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A physician and administrator of the Mississippi’s largest hospital said he’s tired of hearing myths about the effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

“You’ll hear people say, ‘Well, the death rate is not going up,’” Dr. Alan Jones, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Clinical Affairs, said Thursday at a news conference. “Well, the death rate is going up. Look at the numbers over the last couple of days.”

Further, he said people who downplay the seriousness of the virus’ potential are flat wrong.

“I hear people say, ‘Well, this is just a bad flu,’” Jones said. “Come with me up to the ICU, and I’ll show you some 25-year-olds suffocating on their own secretions, and then you tell me that it’s just a bad flu.

“This is not a joke,” he said. “This is bad stuff and nobody wants it.

“But if we don’t do the things that we need to do, we’re not going to take care of you and everybody’s going to have it and it’s going to be a New York situation and we’re going to be in the parking lot trying to take care of people and we can’t do it.”