![]() Cook watched the vaccination numbers trickling in for Jefferson County early in 2021 and knew that more could be done. The vaccine was the first real weapon against the virus, an opportunity to avoid the isolation and pain of 2020.ĭr. That changed as 2021 dawned, and Jefferson County emerged with the rest of Mississippi from the harsh winter surge. ![]() At the time, we just didn’t have the mechanisms to protect ourselves,” he said. Losing people from the nursing home who would still be here, I believe, if not for COVID. The COVID deaths in Jefferson County reverberated through the community. “Typically, not only do you know the person, often you’re related to them in some capacity,” Hammitte said. People know each other in the southwest Mississippi county. Jefferson County, where Hammitte is superintendent, is a small community, mostly centered around the town of Fayette. An amazing dad, an awesome employee-he had two kids attending the junior high,” Hammitte recalled, sighing heavily. And then the next conversation, he was on a ventilator. “Initially we heard that he was doing OK. The disease progressed, as it often does, with a baffling rhythm. “We’re still not sure where he contracted the virus.” “He was one of our custodians at Jefferson County Junior High School,” Hammitte told the Mississippi Free Press. The funeral of his own employee comes to mind first. When he speaks about the long days of 2020, he talks in terms of concrete harm-harm to children from days out of school, harm to families through sickness and death. Adrian Hammitte, COVID was never an abstract.
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