Southeast Missouri town of Sikeston at center of COVID surge

By JIM SALTER
Associated Press

ST. LOUIS (AP) — The epicenter of Missouri’s COVID-19 outbreak has shifted from the state’s southwest to the southeast, and nowhere is harder hit than Sikeston. The town of 16,000 residents sits in Scott and New Madrid counties. State tracking shows those counties have the worst rates of new COVID-19 cases over the past seven days. Eight of the nine hardest-hit counties over the past week are in the southeastern corner of the state. Missouri Delta Medical Center in Sikeston posted on Facebook that it had six people hospitalized with COVID-19 in June, 21 in July and 79 in August. Twenty patients have been admitted already in the first six days of September.