Coronavirus in rural America (Part XC): Washington Post feature on St. Paul, Virginia

Laura Vozzella reports today for the Washington Post out of St. Paul, Virginia, population 970, the site of a coronavirus outbreak.   St. Paul is in southwestern part of the state, in Appalachia.  Here's an excerpt from Vozzella's story:

It took awhile for the global pandemic to wind its way through crooked mountain roads to the coalfields of far Southwest Virginia, but it’s spiking here now. The isolated region, which is trying to replace its dying coal economy with one based on outdoor tourism and higher education, is the only part of the state where case numbers have been climbing steadily all summer.

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“People are stubborn, and a lot of people buy into the, ‘Oh, this is going to go away after the election,’ and, ‘This is not real,’ ” said Pam Chambers, who works at the Food City supermarket in St. Paul, which straddles Wise and Russell counties — two of the 36 communities that state health officials include in their expansive definition of the Southwest, stretching from east of Lynchburg to the Cumberland Gap.

But attitudes toward pandemic precautions have begun to shift as the number of local cases has risen. Chambers started handing out masks to Food City shoppers just after Memorial Day, and so far, she said, only three have refused: a teenager with asthma and two elderly coal miners with black lung disease.

Vozzella quotes an unidentified Wise County resident who "wears a mask over his long gray beard and spoke to her on the condition of anonymity." 

I’m a Harley guy. I’m bearded. I don’t have a gun — I have an armory.  “Macho," to me, is a word. It will get you nowhere, except probably into trouble. So if there’s some way or some minute possibility of taking care of yourself, what’s the harm in doing it? I mean, I don’t want to be laying there in the hospital with both lungs clogged up with this crap saying, "I wish I’d done that.”

There's lots more local color in the story which, as of this evening, is the most read Washington Post story from the DC, Maryland, Virginia section.