Coronavirus in rural America (Part LI): Big WaPo feature

Reis Thebault and Abigail Hauslohner report today for the Washington Post under the headline, "A deadly 'checkerboard': COVID-19's new surge across rural America."  I won't belabor the part that  regular readers of this blog already know:  rural America is older, sicker, less formally educated, poorer, more religious etc., except to say it's covered in the story.  Regular readers (and those who follow rural America more generally) also know what's been happening with coronavirus in rural places--that meatpacking plants, prisons, and church services have become hot spots.  The journalists also note the part about isolation and places being "hard to reach."  And, of course, there has been the politicization of mask-wearing, with this plea from the North Dakota governor a few days ago. 

Here's a quote the Post journalists include from a public health official for Hillsdale County, Michigan, Rebecca Burns:  

We’ve got a little bit of everything: folks who feel their rights have been taken away because they’ve been asked to stay home and they lost jobs and they’re really hurting, and we have folks who are very concerned and frightened and won’t leave their house.

Hillsdale County, population 46,688, in the state's south central region, last month topped the state for the highest death toll among rural counties. The spike there, like many in rural America, was due to a nursing home outbreak. Other rural outbreaks, like those in Arkansas and Ohio, were centered in prisons.

The story also features two other contrasting rural locations that have been hot spots at one time or another this spring:  Sun Valley, Idaho, an example of rural gentrification (which I wrote about here) and Dougherty County, Georgia, in the black belt, which I wrote about here.

Then there is this vignette from Texas County, Oklahoma, population 20,640, where

patients pouring into the hospital with covid-19 symptoms are predominantly Hispanic and work in the local Seaboard Foods pork processing plant, which like many others has stayed open even after becoming the locus of an outbreak. 

Some of the workers tell Jeffrey Lim, one of the county’s few internal medicine physicians, that they have seen colleagues who appear ill continue to show up at the plant. State health officials tested everybody at the plant two weeks ago and found that of some 1,600 asymptomatic employees, 350 were positive, nearly four times as were known, Seaboard said in a statement. “As of May 20, 440 employees have active cases of covid-19,” the company said.

Dr. Lim is also quoted talking about the lack of mask usage:

If you go to the local Walmart, I would say 10 percent of people are wearing masks, and the restaurants … that are open are packed.

Then the story closes with this vignette out of Decatur County, Indiana, population 25,740, where a high school basketball game that drew 27,000 became a super-spreader event in early March.  Given the basketball link, it's a very Indiana kind of story.  Another rural theme:  lack of anonymity.  A county public health official, Sean Durbin, is quoted:

“Being a small community, what is that line in ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’? ‘Every man’s death diminishes me,’” Durbin said, quoting the John Donne poem. “If I didn’t know every death, if I didn’t know them personally — and I knew many of them personally — you always know someone who knows them in a community this size.”