Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXXV): Back to California

Both the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee are running stories today about the rural-urban divide over coronavirus in the Golden State.  It appears that cases of coronavirus in rural areas are much lower (also as measured per capita) in most rural areas, especially in far northern California.  Governor Newsom has even been responding to criticism in terms of rural-urban difference in the past few days.  Don't miss the maps produced by the Sacramento Bee, one for cases, one for deaths.  You'll see that the "hottest" counties in far northern California are Shasta (county seat Redding, the most populous county north of Sacramento) and Tehama (county seat Red Bluff, just south of Shasta County).  

Here's a quote from Leila Miller's story for the Los Angeles Times, which features a photo of Yuba City, but starts out talking about Tehama County:

For Bob Williams, the chairman of Tehama County’s Board of Supervisors, the numbers don’t justify the reality. The rural Northern California community of 65,000 has had only one case of the coronavirus, but it continues to face the same restrictions from the state as denser cities such as Los Angeles, which has had more than 23,000 cases. 

That’s why Williams has joined elected officials from the Central Coast, Central Valley, Northern California and elsewhere who have asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to let them gradually lift their stay-at-home order. They have argued that their infection rates are incomparable to hot spots in the state and that the coronavirus appears under control. 

Tehama County will already suffer from the cancellation of the 99th annual Red Bluff Round-Up, a rodeo that generates $4 million to $7 million for a local economy that only has a sales tax revenue of about $2 million a year. By reopening, Williams hopes to lessen the harm. 

The story quotes Williams:

Is it fair to treat Tehama the same as L.A. County?  I think the locals that are dealing with the problem here are better suited to understand what’s needed in rural California than folks in Sacramento or L.A.

The Bee story, by Philip Reese,  Tony Bizjak and Jayson Chesler, states that the Bee's

review of infection and death rates in each of the state’s 58 counties shows vast differences in the depth of the crisis, notably between lightly-hit rural and harder-hit urban spots. The rural north state in particular stands out with lower rates.

The numbers help explain why some rural counties are pushing the governor to rescind or loosen his statewide “stay at home” order for their areas.

Among California's nonmetro counties, only Mono County has a high per capita rate of infection. I've written about the situation in Mono County, which includes the Mammoth Lake ski resort, here and here.

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXXIV): New Mexico

Simon Romero reported this story for the New York Times last week, dateline Albuquerque, under the headline, "How New Mexico, One of the Poorest States, Averted a Steep Death Toll."  The odds were against the state that calls itself the Land of Enchantment, which has fewer hospital beds per capita than most states.  It is also a high-poverty state, and many of its residents are elderly. 

Still, infectious disease specialists say New Mexico seems to have staved off disaster — for the moment, at least — with a coronavirus death rate that is lower than neighboring states like Colorado and Oklahoma.

New Mexico’s measures included shutting down schools before most states, aggressively expanding social distancing, ramping up testing beyond levels achieved in richer states and using a pioneering telemedicine initiative to quickly train rural health workers for coronavirus care.

Romero quotes Helen Wearing, a University of New Mexico mathematician who is an expert on disease ecology: 

Hundreds of lives were saved because of what the state did early on, and that’s using conservative estimates.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXXIII): Leveling the playing field for rural K-12 students

Ever since most states send their public school kids home, numerous media outlets have renewed their attention to the digital divide.

One of the better stories I've read or heard is this one from NPR on April 24, "Even In Crisis Times, There Is A Push To Wire Rural America," reported by Kirk Siegler.  The dateline is Lockhart, Texas, population 12,698, and an excerpt follows:

As the COVID-19 crisis took hold and schools in Lockhart, Texas, had to close and shift to remote learning, the school district quickly conducted a needs assessment. 

They found that half of their 6,000 students have no high-speed Internet at home. And despite being a short drive south of Austin, a third of all the students and staff live in "dead zones," where Internet and cell service aren't even available. 

Mark Estrada is the superintendent at the Lockhart Independent School District, and the needs of his students and staff have not exactly caught him off guard.  Siegler quotes Estrada:

Students who have been historically underserved just continue to have that fate as technology becomes a bigger part of educational practices.

Siegler's report continues:

At a time when many of us are going online to do everything from work to school to shopping to health care, the COVID-19 crisis is shining a big light on the haves and have-nots when it comes to the Internet. The federal government estimates upwards of a third of all people in rural America have little or no access to the Internet, a statistic that could only worsen as the economic fallout from the pandemic continues.

Fortunately in Lockhart, Estrada and his staff were already shepherding through a plan to address this digital divide before COVID-19 hit. 

It's now being fast-tracked. 

With the help of a local Internet provider, the district is installing seven booster towers outside each of its schools. These will beam the Internet into every home that needs it across the 300-square-mile district. It will be free to families, costing the district just $30 a year per household.

A story of a less ambitious school district plan is this one, out of Elkins, Arkansas, as written about by a columnist in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.   Nevertheless, it seems this school administrator in a rural district in Washington County (which is metropolitan) was more forward thinking than most.  Elkins population is 2,648, but/and it is part of the Northwest Arkansas Metropolitan Area and not far at all from the outskirts of Fayetteville, home to the University of Arkansas' flagship and land grant campus.  What this school district is doing is more common, and that is outfitting busses as hotspots and then parking them strategically to facilitate student access.  That won't work for districts whose students are more far flung, like the one I attended K-12 in Jasper, Arkansas, two counties away from Elkins, though not too far as the crow flies.  In really spatially dispersed districts covering a lot of territory, you won't be able to park busses, no matter how strategic you are, to meet all the need--unless you have a whole lot of busses. 

This bus-as-hotspot strategy reminds me that Governor Gavin Newsom announced a few weeks ago that seven busses were being outfitted as hot spots for California school students, though I don't recall him saying what district those busses would be dispatched to.

This earlier story by the New York Times, "As School Moves Online, Many Students Remain Logged Out," from April 6, 2020, is pretty urban-centric, but does briefly nod to the rural with a few paragraphs about "rural" Minford, Ohio.

In rural Minford, a town of about 700 in southern Ohio near the border with Kentucky, the district is distributing laptops as well as work packets on paper to students without internet or technology access, estimated at 25 to 30 percent of the student body by the district’s superintendent. 

Regardless of whether Minford’s students can participate in online classes or turn in work, administrators expect to promote a majority of them to the next grade, said Marin Applegate, the district’s school psychologist. “We do not feel they are in control and cannot be held accountable,” she said.

In fact, the New York Times editorial board has published two editorials about the consequences of the school shutdowns for low-income kids.  The first is from March 27, 2020, "Locked Out of the Virtual Classroom, and the second is "50 Million Kids Can't Attend School.  What Happens to Them?" published on April 16, 2020.   The latter doesn't mention rural or urban, but the former includes this information about a program that sounds like the one the Texas school district, featured in the NPR story, is using:

[FCC] Commissioner Rosenworcel’s access plan focuses on expanding the federal program known as E-Rate, which helps qualifying schools, school systems and libraries acquire broadband at up to a 90 percent discount. E-Rate program funding is based on demand, up to an annual F.C.C.-established cap of $4.15 billion. It would be a simple matter for the commission to extend the program so that schools can buy hot spots that are then distributed to needy students.

But given the dire need in poor and rural communities, it would also be right to leverage E-Rate — or something like it — to bring permanent broadband into homes for millions of internet-deprived schoolchildren and subsistence workers.

Finally closing the digital divide — and bringing all Americans into the information age — will require a momentous effort on the scale of the federal project that brought electricity to darkened regions of the country during the New Deal. And it will be similarly worth the effort.

In any event, all of these tales of scrambling to supply students with broadband reflect poorly on federal priorities, which have failed to connect the nation--all of the nation--to broadband.  Coronavirus has cast into even sharper relief the digital divide, the rift between the "haves" and the "have nots." It's also reminding us that many of the "have nots" are rural.

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXXII): Far NorCal counties seek to re-open

Here's the story from the Redding Record Searchlight, which is based in Shasta County, the most populous and one of few metropolitan counties north of Sacramento:

Modoc, Tehama and Siskiyou counties are hoping their scant coronavirus cases will mean they can reopen parts of the economy again sooner than the rest of California.

All three counties are working out plans for letting some aspects of life return to normal, but there's a big caveat: Gov. Gavin Newsom would still have to give the OK.

Tehama County has had one confirmed case of the virus, while Modoc hasn't had any and Siskiyou County has had five so far. Out of the three counties, only the one Tehama County patient has died.

While Modoc, Tehama and Siskiyou counties do attract tourists, their economies tend to be more ag and extraction-based and therefore to experience less population churn.  The counties surrounding Lake Tahoe, on the other hand, in Nevada and El Dorado counties, are highly gentrified by second-home owners.  In Truckee, near the north shore, the incidence of coronavirus is 7 to 10 times higher than elsewhere in the state.  The San Francisco Chronicle reports that this has pitted year-round residents against week-enders.

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXXI): Big NYT feature on rural hospitals, closures

On the home page of the New York Times since this morning has been this cool map showing where Americans live in proximity to an emergency room.  I note that most of the folks spatially removed from an ED (emergency department) are in the west--not surprising given the greater population sparseness there.  But in my home state of Arkansas, the places where people tend to be that far from an ED include, yes, my home county, Newton County, Arkansas.  I know from first hand experience that the nearest ED is the hospital where I was born, at that time the Boone County Hospital, now the North Arkansas Medical Center.  Other places in Arkansas that are what we might consider health care deserts are west central Arkansas and a few places in the Mississippi River Delta.

The complementary feature to the map is this very long and deeply reported New York Times story on what is happening in rural America in relation to the coronavirus crisis.  It focuses on recent rural hospital closures, which number 120 in the past decade.  Some of those closures are attributable to consolidation, some in Appalachia (as previously reported).  Here are a couple of data intensive paragraphs from the story:

Across the United States, hospitals serving rural areas have spent decades trying to provide medical care and produce enough revenue to stay open. They have closed in increasing numbers in recent years as local populations have declined. About 170 rural hospitals have shut down since 2005.

* * *  

But for-profit hospitals are more likely to close than the others, one recent federal study showed. It found that for-profit facilities accounted for 11 percent of rural hospitals but 36 percent of closures among the group. Within the past year, rural hospitals have closed in Pennsylvania and Tennessee after selling to for-profit chains.

The story mentions the work of Jill Horwitz, Vice Dean of the UCLA School of Law, who studies hospital ownership and consolidation.  She has found that "for-profit rural hospitals were less likely to offer needed but unprofitable medical services, such as hospice and inpatient psychiatric care."  Here's a quote form Horwitz:

There is something very concerning to me about having more for-profit companies in rural health care. The more rural a hospital, the more people depend on it for lifesaving care.

* * * 

The goal of the for-profit is to make money. That doesn’t mean they’ll do anything to make a buck, but they have a different goal from nonprofits.

I'm glad to know that a very urban scholar in a city like Los Angeles is expressing concern about what is happening in rural America.  It reminds me of this recent scholarly article by Elizabeth Weeks. 

Here's an excerpt about Early County, Georgia, in the state's southwest corner, where five of the county's 11,000 residents have died, and 92 cases of coronavirus have been reported.  The mayor and police chief of the small town of Blakely are among those infected.  Here's a quote from the assistant police chief, Tonya Tinsley, that is heavy on small town lack of anonymity. 

Being from a small town, you think it’s not going to touch us.  We are so small and tucked away. You have a perception that it’s in bigger cities. 

That is all gone now. 

You say, wait a minute, I know them!. It’s, like, oh my God, I knew them. I used to talk to them. I knew their family. Their kids. It’s a blow to the community each time.

This comprehensive story mentions many U.S. regions and quotes Montana Senator Jon Tester about the situation in his state.  It's well worth a read in its entirety. 

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXX): unemployment benefits, state variations, and cost of living

Here is a chart from the NYT a few days ago showing state-to-state variations in what the federal boost in unemployment benefits did to state unemployment benefits in place before the federal top up.  The story's lede explains: 

Before the coronavirus, people receiving unemployment benefits in most states got, on average, less than half their weekly salaries. 

Now, as millions file claims, many are poised to receive more money than they would have typically earned in their jobs, thanks to the additional $600 a week set aside in the federal stimulus package for the unemployed. 

That calculation is based on an analysis of the so-called replacement rate, which is the share of a worker’s wages that is replaced by unemployment benefits.

Bottom line, in about half the states, the $600/week is certainly sufficient to keep workers at home--one of its goals, depending on who you ask--because it means they earn more from the combination of the federal supplement of $600/week and the state unemployment benefits than they would if they were working. 

Of course, a person's ordinary income (barista wages of $10 to $15/hour versus more skilled/highly valued labor) and the state's cost of living are key variables when assessing the generosity and appropriateness of the current benefits. 

Here's a story from NPR about how these variations played out in Kentucky, a state that already had a generous unemployment benefit.  The dateline for this story is Harlan, Kentucky, a notoriously impoverished part of the state, and Scott Horsely reports, interviewing Sky Marietta who, with her husband, opened a coffee shop last year in Harlan with the goals of providing "good coffee, good Internet services, and some opportunity in a community that has been starved of all three."  The Mariettas hoped to "transform the downtowns and main streets of eastern Kentucky" and they provided much needed jobs, interviewing perhaps 100 applicants when they opened.  The Mariettas stayed open during  the first few weeks of the coronavirus shut down, which came just a few months after they opened the doors of their establishment.   

The No. 1 people that we're serving right now are health care workers. I feel like they don't have a lot of options, and they certainly deserve at least some coffee in this, right?

But once the $600/week payments started flowing, many employees asked to be laid off.  Marietta wrote on her blog:

Not because they did not like their jobs or because they did not want to work, but because it would cost them literally hundreds of dollars per week to be employed.

* * * 

We basically have this situation where it would be a logical choice for a lot of people to be unemployed.

* * *  

You also have to think, the benefit of not having to go to work, especially during a pandemic. It's not that we don't wish that we could pay our employees at that level all the time. You're always wanting to pay your staff the best you possible can. But to be put in a position where you can't compete with them being at home, unemployed. It's really tricky. It's a really difficult situation to be in.

Marietta wonders if she'll get her employees back in July, when the benefits run out. 

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXIX): jails

Data for Progress posted this today by Lauren Sudeall, Jessica Pishko, and Aaron Littman on rural jails in the era of cornonavirus.  The executive summary follows, and the full report is here: 

Rural communities have certain traits that make them particularly vulnerable in a pandemic. On the whole, people living in rural regions are poorer, older, and less healthy. One in three rural counties has a poverty rate over 20%. More than half of all births at rural hospitals are covered by Medicaid. Rural communities are quickly losing hospitals and health care providers. Small newspapers are closing across the heartland, and internet access in rural areas is often limited, so rural residents may not have accurate information about the pandemic or how to best respond.

Many of these concerns are amplified in rural jails. People detained in rural jails are likely to be there because they cannot afford cash bail. Judges in rural courts often send people to jail for drug possession, in part because there are few diversion programs. Given the paucity of medical providers and other social services in rural areas, the criminal legal system is often used to address a range of social, emotional, and financial problems that elsewhere may be handled outside of the court system through community treatment or other programs. And people inside the jails may have prior substance use or other medical problems that are exacerbated in a pandemic.

Don't miss the maps, including those showing what percentage of inmates in particular states are in jails in counties that have not a single ICU bed.  In my home state of Arkansas, it's a quarter of inmates.  And that would include my home county, Newton, which has no hospital and therefore no ICU beds.   

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXVIII): Montana's hi-line

Hi-Line is the moniker Montanans use for the strip of northern counties that border Canada, and one of those counties, Toole, population 5,324, is featured in a radio story that ran on NPR this morning.  The story was actually reported last week by Nate Hegyi, but just picked up nationally today as part of the America Amplified 2020 series.

Four of Montana's 10 coronavirus deaths have occurred in Toole County's seat, Shelby; these are mostly attributable to an outbreak at the county's only assisted living facility, called Marias.  Here's an excerpt focusing on the good news:  the county's preparedness, attributable to the fact that the Chicago to Seattle (and vice versa) Amtrak train stops in Shelby, the county seat, twice daily.  This means that, even though Shelby might seem like the middle of nowhere, it is connected by mass transportation to the rest of the world, and therefore vulnerable to coronavirus.  Hegyi quotes William Kiefer, CEO of Marias Medical Center:

We believe that everyone staying in their homes and following the guidance of the CDC is incredibly important.  To this point it's been very successful in Toole County.

Hegyi also addresses small-town ingenuity:

There's also something else that Marias Medical Center did that other U.S. hospitals should all take note of for future pandemics. It planned ahead before the virus even reached our shores. 

We have a group of dedicated people here that thought, 'Wow, if it does hit the United States, we're a very rural frontier facility and we should do everything in our power now."

Hegyi clarifies:

Back in January, Marias began purchasing and storing personal protective equipment. The excess masks, face shields and gowns reduced the chances of exposure for their staff after the outbreak in the hospital's assisted living facility took hold. However, Kiefer says he wishes they were wearing them regularly before the virus arrived in Shelby because once the first patient tested positive, many of the medical center's employees were unwittingly exposed to the virus. 

Thus Marias Medical Center in Shelby has been left short-staffed.  Further, it has just 21 beds and two ventilators, but it has formed an alliance with medical centers in other hi-line counties, including those in Kalispell, Browning, Conrad and Cut Bank.  Marias also has plans to air evac patients to Helena, as necessary. 

Kiefer comments:

Although we're small, we're not isolated.  People do move around quite a bit.

And as Hegyi concludes, in the context of a pandemic, "it's that movement that can kill." And that is why orders limiting movement --or at least screening those who are moving--are appropriate at times like these.

Here's the Billings Gazette's April 19 coverage of what is happening in Shelby and Toole County.  It's a very deeply reported story by Jeff Welsch, heavy on lack of anonymity and history, among other rural themes.  An excerpt quoting Dwaine Iverson, a CPA in Shelby, follows:

When you drive down Main Street and don’t see a car, it’s frightening.  Impacts are everywhere. And if we don’t do something to keep (businesses) alive, when we get all done with this ... Main Street now, with the shutdown, is going to look like that all the
time.

The story continues:

Iverson recalls his wife, Barbara, who works at the Heritage Center, and three daughters, all nurses in other Montana communities, initially warning him he "wasn't taking it seriously enough" when COVID-19 first gripped Seattle and surged toward Montana. Soon after, Barbara was in quarantine at home, even though she was off-duty when the virus hit.

Then the first three residents died.

More from Iverson: 

It feels real because you know the people who died.  They’re prominent people around here. They come from large families. They were personal friends of mine, clients of mine. That brings it home.

* * *

The biggest issue is families can’t even get together to grieve. That type of thing makes it so tough because the whole grieving process is so critical to go through and could affect the rest of your life. When you can’t give somebody a hug, how important is that?

Another resident, Michael Bashor, commented: "We all pretty much know who they are."

This Billings Gazette story features great photos, too, from Larry Mayer.

And here's a Montana Public Radio story from 1 April indicating that Governor Steve Bullock ordered health screenings of those arriving in Montana via train or plane.  An earlier post about coronavirus impacts in Montana is here, and an even earlier one is here.

My own very long 2010 law review article, featuring lots about Montana's human, political and physical geography in relation to the delivery of health and human services to children is discussed here.  What a treat it was for me to give talks at the University of Montana in Missoula in 2009 and 2016, and to vacation there in 2011 (Glacier National Park, Missoula, Ravalli County/Darby) and 2017 (Bozeman, Livingston, Gardiner).

I'm a huge fan of "the last best place" and Governor Bullock.  For still more on the Big Sky state, search "Montana" here on Legal Ruralism.

Canada's worst mass murder, this weekend in rural Nova Scotia

I've been pondering the relevance of rurality to this horrendous event since news of it broke on Sunday, and I've not yet reached any clear conclusions.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered these thoughts on the impact on Nova Scotia, population 923,598 because of the high density of acquaintanceship there, as reported by the Associated Press:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau noted how close-knit the small province of Nova Scotia is. 

“The vast majority of Nova Scotians will have a direct link with one or more of the victims. The entire province and country is grieving right now as we come to grips with something that is unimaginable,” Trudeau told a news conference.

Nova Scotia's population is small, but it is the second most densely province in Canada, which of course still doesn't make it very densely populated.

It seems the perpetrator first killed his former paramour and her new boyfriend, but that's not a particularly rural phenomenon.  The killing spree the murderer went on after that was arguably not mitigated, not stopped because of the relative lack of police presence.  I have written previously of the government/law/the state's struggle to adequately monitor large rural swaths, rendering them relatively lawless. Those are the sorts of swaths of territory that the killer covered as he murdered the next 20 people, apparently disguised as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which is itself extraordinary.  The crimes took place in five different population clusters or villages, at 16 different locations.

Here's the New York Times report from today, and here is the NPR story. 

An excerpt from the NPR story follows:

During the attack, which lasted 12 hours, the suspect, identified as Gabriel Wortman, 51, wore an authentic RCMP uniform and one of the cars he used "was a very real look-alike" for a police vehicle, authorities said. 

* * * 

Since the attacks, questions have arisen over why the RCMP used Twitter to alert the public to the manhunt for the shooter, instead of activating the province-wide Alert Ready system. 

The warning system - which blares a siren by cellphone - was last used April 10 to warn people to stay home during the Easter weekend to prevent spread of the coronavirus, according to Canada's National Post newspaper. 

At a news conference on Monday, Chief Superintendent Leather said the force believed that Twitter was "a superior way to communicate" but will take a close look at that reasoning as part of its investigation.

The failure to use the warning system reminds me of recent reports of out New Zealand, where authorities chose to use the noisy and abrupt warning system to catch residents' attention re: the coronavirus shelter-in-place order.

The New York Times story provides profiles of many of those killed and focuses on the struggle to achieve socially-distanced funerals for the nearly two dozen who died this past weekend.

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXVII): prisons as a rural hotspot

I've been trying to keep up with coronavirus data out of Arkansas, my home state, and today I even watched Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson's daily press conference for the first time.  Among other phenomena in what we used to call "The Land of Opportunity," now "The Natural State," I'm paying attention to the outbreak at "Cummins Unit," as it is often called, the state's prison farm, in southeast Arkansas, in the Delta.  Here's the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's coverage that was making headlines a few days ago, and here is an excerpt from today's story, which explains that the ACLU and NAACP are suing for inmates release.  

Inmates at three state prisons filed a federal class-action lawsuit Tuesday over the spread of coronavirus within the system, seeking to force the release of elderly and medically frail inmates from crowded prisons, and better access to disinfectants and hygiene products. 

The lawsuit comes as infections at the state's largest prison, the Cummins Unit, flared to more than 600 cases, making it one of the densest coronavirus hot spots in the country.

The suit alleges that prison officials violated inmates' rights by forcing them to live together -- less than 6 feet apart -- in crowded barracks, without supplies of soap, hand sanitizer or other disinfectants to fight the virus. 

One plaintiff, a man in his 20s identified in the complaint as "John Doe," is claimed by his attorneys to be among the inmates at the Cummins Unit who tested positive for the virus and was quarantined.

Cummins is located in Lincoln County, population 14, 034, which is obviously now reporting a very high incidence of infection.

Lincoln County loomed large in this study I did about five years ago of the state's rural lawyer shortage.  Lincoln County has one of the most acute lawyer shortages in the state or, for that matter, the nation. 

Here's coverage of what is happening in Cummins from KATV out of Little Rock. 

We have also seen very high concentrations of coronavirus in jails, most notably in Chicago and New York, which media have paid quite a bit of attention to.  But it seems inevitable that some of the highest concentrations at the county level would be in rural places, where populations are low but incarcerated persons constitute significant proportions of populations as tracked by the U.S. Census.

This April 29, 2020 postscript, from the mayor of Pine Bluff, published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, makes the point I made above.

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXVI): the rural-coastal divide in California

Politico reported yesterday from the state's Central Valley under the headline, "How California’s coastal-rural divide could provide lessons for the nation."  Interesting that journalist Mackenzie Mays highlights the coastal-rural divide, rather than the urban-rural divide, though the two are largely synonymous, well excepting Sacramento and Fresno, which are the fourth and fifth largest cities in the state and both inland, and also excepting some far northern and central California coastal communities.  Now that I think about all the exceptions to the coastal-rural divide, I'm not sure it's a good proxy for rural-urban divide--not sure it's an accurate description of California geography.

In any event, Mays' report is datelined Sacramento and focuses on the heart of the Great Central Valley, the nation's most important agricultural region.  Here's an excerpt:

When California emerges from its coronavirus lockdown, the state's often overlooked rural counties could be the first to open up rather than the nationally trendsetting San Francisco Bay Area. 

Rural counties house roughly one-tenth of California's nearly 40 million residents but comprise more than half its land mass. A greater share of inland residents have continued to work in essential sectors under social isolation orders, and many think their thinly populated communities are less vulnerable to Covid-19 spread and shouldn't be held back by coastal cities. A distrust of Sacramento directives and a government helmed by liberal Gov. Gavin Newsom are also at play.

California's divide could become a harbinger for how rural and coastal states ease their restrictions in different ways with less populated areas lifting closures sooner than denser cities. Escalating frustration among conservatives over stay-at-home-orders’ impacts on the economy has led to protests across the country, and similar demonstrations have been organized in pockets of California.

* * * 

If rural counties open before densely populated coastal cities, health officials will watch closely to see whether different social distancing rules can coexist in the same state — and what health effects an isolated reopening would have locally and beyond.
Despite growing pressure to reopen, health officials worry about a lack of sufficient testing in rural communities — and the potential for disproportionate suffering due to socioeconomic barriers and health care shortages they faced pre-pandemic. 

In rural Tulare County, one of California's last Republican bastions, Supervisor Pete Vander Poel expects a “strong push” from the agricultural center to reopen as soon as possible. 

Mays quotes Vander Poel: 

We are not a highly concentrated urban area.  I believe that our businesses feel like they can accommodate social distancing and increase hygiene and sanitation much quicker and on a much more open basis.

But Tulare County, with a population of nearly half a million, is hardly rural.  So far, it's seen more than 300 cases, mostly from nursing homes.  Mays quotes Governor Gavin Newsom: 

For those that think this is just an urban construct, or densified in certain parts of the state, it exists and persists, Covid-19, throughout the state, including rural California.  None of us are immune from this disease, and if we stop taking it seriously, we will have serious consequences.

Here's a story out of Stanislaus County, also in the Central Valley, and here's a story of protests out of Del Norte County, in far northern California.  Contrary to Mays' construct, Del Norte County is coastal but very rural.  An earlier post about Del Norte County is here. 

And here's a comment from Governor Newsom's press conference today on the issue of some local governments moving to open before he gives the go-ahead:

I imagine there’ll be some examples of people just getting ahead of that collaborative spirit. And we may have to dial a little bit of that back.