Coronavirus in rural America: (Part XVI): the South

As news coverage of coronavirus' consequences for rural America ramps up, one theme has been what is happening in the American south, which is our nation's most rural region.  Margaret Renkl's column in the New York Times last week was headlined, "In the American South, a Perfect Storm is Gathering."  Renkl, who is based in Nashville, writes a weekly column.  This is about the fact that many southern governors--in the very places that didn't expand Medicaid--have been slow to issue shelter-in-place orders, which is likely to result in fast coronavirus spread.  Renkl uses Tennessee and its neighbor Kentucky to "compare and contrast":

Kentucky, which not only elected a Democratic governor but also expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, is an outlier in the South. Most Southern states, like Tennessee, did not expand Medicaid, and in those states a perfect storm has gathered force. What does it mean to live though a pandemic in a place with a high number of uninsured citizens, where many counties don’t have a single hospital, and where the governor delayed requiring folks to stay home? Across the South, we are about to find out.

Then there are these very dire stories out of Alabama, from Ramsey Archibald at AL.com.  The first notes that Alabama was, as of April 4, predicted to have the highest coronavirus death rate in the nation, though that was revised downward on April 5 to be the 21st highest death rate among states. 

But some estimates predict a more dire situation here, as a recent epidemiological model shows Alabama could have the highest per capita death rate in the country, and the fourth highest total death count. 

If the worst were to happen - if Alabamians refuse to follow social distancing measures, the state’s intensive care units become overfull with the most ill coronavirus patients, or even if people here are unlucky - nearly 10,000 Alabamians could die from COVID-19 by the middle of next month. 

That’s according to projections released earlier this week from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. IHME released projections for every U.S. state on April 1, and will continue to update them.

And here's a story, also by Archibald, about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on rural economies.  It's now more than a week old, from April 3, 2020.

More than 80,000 Alabamians filed for unemployment insurance last week. That represents an increase of more than 2,100 percent since the start of this year, and many Alabama counties have seen even larger spikes. 

And Alabama isn’t alone. People from all over the country have lost their jobs since the onset of the virus, as the U.S. as a whole saw a spike of more than 3,000 percent from pre-pandemic levels. 10 million people have filed for unemployment nationwide in just the last two weeks.

Of course, Louisiana has received a great deal of media attention as a coronavirus "hot spot."  Time will reveal the consequences of the slow-to-close strategy embraced by most southern governors, including those of Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Florida (which is at least partly "southern"). 

Postscript:  Here's a Tweet from April 2 poking fun at the Southern governors' decision re: coronavirus and linking those decisions to Reconstruction Era thinking.