Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves told Newsmax TV on Wednesday that his state is leading the nation when it comes to testing residents for the coronavirus, which is helping them keep the virus from spreading.
Reeves said on “The National Report” that “this might surprise people but Mississippi has been a leader when it comes to testing. When we initially started this process, the model that everyone looked at was South Korea. At that time, they were testing 5,200 of their residents per million. They’ve since doubled that, so they're closer to a little over 10,000 per million residents . . . Mississippi’s closer to 23,000, so, we're almost two and a half times the amount of testing that's even going on in in South Korea, and if you take the states in America that have had significant federal resources poured into them, from a testing standpoint, you take them out of the equation and Mississippi’s one of the top testing states in all of the country.”
Reeves said, “We believe testing is critically important, because our strategy from the get-go has not been to lock people in their homes, but it has been to identify those who have the virus, isolate them, figure out who they come in contact with within a certain time, and then we'll isolate those individuals, so as to slow the spread of the virus.”
The governor added that the state is “certainly having a profound impact” on the spread of the virus, since they “have not seen a major spike in our state, we’ve simply seen what we believe to be a plateau, which has been ongoing for many, many days now.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.