Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXIII): more on "the South"

Here's an excerpt from the essay by physician and writer Edwin Leap in The Atlantic, under the headline, "A Doctor’s Warning From the Rural South: Small community hospitals already operate on the very edge of disaster every day."

Life in the rural South is tied closely to nature. Live here long enough and you can tell that a storm is rising by the way the leaves roll in the wind. A strange silence can precede bad weather, as the birds shelter on the ground and the air pressure changes throughout the house. In my part of rural South Carolina, we are experiencing a new kind of silence: a kind of breath-holding, sky-watching, prayer-whispering pause as we wait for COVID-19 to arrive in earnest. 

Dr. Leap works in rural South Carolina, where he reports that his county has 15 cases so far.  His short (but important) essay concludes:

If COVID-19 strikes rural America with the fury it has unleashed in more populous places, many more lives will be lost, especially if the resources are already committed elsewhere. If this happens, rural southerners will do what they always have done in times of trial: Band together, do their best, and try to survive. Then bury the dead in family plots, weep, and carry on. 

Rural hospitals have been limping along for decades. The rural South—rural America in general—deserves a robust medical system, including a series of small hospitals intentionally located to mitigate disaster and save lives. Pandemic or not.

Postscript:  The State newspaper out of Columbia, South Carolina, posted this story on April 19.  It's deeply reported, but still a standard rural angle on the coronavirus crisis.  An excerpt with some data on rural counties versus urban ones (as measured by a county population of 70K) follows:

A lack of adequate testing and protective equipment, poverty that discourages trips to the doctor, relatively few doctors and nurses, higher percentages of people in poor health and limited information about the dangers of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, are among the issues affecting rural areas dealing with the coronavirus.

But as the disease takes its toll, these challenges need addressing, say advocates for the state’s rural areas. Often neglected, rural South Carolina faces a problem like none it has seen before. 

The impact of the virus, increasingly well documented in bigger counties like Richland, is now being felt in rural, smaller counties that in some cases are underequipped to handle the crisis. Three of the top five counties in rates of infection have populations of under 70,000, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. 

Those are Clarendon, Lee and Kershaw, where the outbreak first was identified in large numbers. Sumter County, also in the top five, has just over 100,000 people, but large swaths of rural areas. 

The journalists quote Rep. Lonnie Hosey, D-Barnwell: 

Do you want us to give up our territory and move to metro Columbia, Charleston or Greenville?  No? Then why don’t you help us? We don’t have the amenities you have. But we are still part of America.