Coronavirus in rural America (Part LXXVI): From a town and school in exurban Atlanta

This story appeared on the front page of today's New York Times, dateline Jefferson, Georgia, population 9,432.  Richard Fausset reports under the headline, "A Small Georgia City Plans to Put Students in Classrooms This Week."  The story features Jennifer Fogle, whose family moved to the community from Indiana 14 years ago.  Here's an excerpt:

Ms. Fogle, 46, a stay-at-home mother, thinks these decisions are unwise. But after weighing her options, including online education promoted by the district but taught by a private company or the state, she decided it best to let her two teenage children embrace the risks and physically attend Jefferson High School. It seemed futile, she said, to go against the grain in a heavily pro-Trump community where many see masks as an infringement of their personal freedom — and in a state where the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, has been urging districts to reopen their classrooms despite the pandemic’s growing toll. 

“I can’t fix it,” Ms. Fogle said. “So I have to learn, how do we live life as normal as possible and still try to protect ourselves?” 

The reopening plans have starkly divided Jefferson, a middle-class city of about 12,000 people, offering a likely preview of the contentious debates ahead for many other communities whose school years start closer to the end of summer. 

An online petition created by two Jefferson High seniors calling for a mandatory-mask rule has garnered more than 600 signatures. But a competing petition demanding that masks remain a choice for students has attracted more than 200 signers, some of whom have left comments that underscore the politicized nature of the disagreement. “Only liberals can get rona and I’m not a liberal,” wrote one, using a slang term for the coronavirus. “TRUMP2020 no mask fo me.”

Some data on Jefferson, in Jackson County, which is contiguous to Gwinnett, a more central part of the greater Atlanta metro area:  The county has seen 13 deaths related to coronavirus, and the infection rate is 1067 per 100,000 people. 

But in nearby Gwinnett County, which has about 12 times as many people, the infection rate is considerably higher and 216 people have died. More broadly, Georgia, in the week ending July 23, has seen an average of 3,287 new cases per day — an increase of 42 percent from the average two weeks earlier. Many Jefferson residents traditionally commute for work to Atlanta and beyond.