Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXXIX): Time Magazine and the AP weigh in

Seems like this is the day for big rural stories, with one from Time Magazine and one from the Associated Press both just out.  What both stories convey, I think, is the still great unknown about what is going to happen in rural America as shelter-in-place orders are lifted.  What we can see at this point is a lot of variation, with some notable rural hotspots, other rural places still relatively unfazed.

Vera Burgengruen writes for Time from the Nebraska panhandle, and the headline is "Rural America Risks Letting Down Its Guard Just as Coronavirus Is About to Hit."  Here's the lede, which conveys a lot of fear:

It’s cattle-branding season in the panhandle of Nebraska, but this spring things look starkly different. What is usually one of the biggest social events of the year in a state where livestock makes up two-thirds of farm revenue has been cut down to the bare essentials: no children, no older crew members, and bag lunches instead of large festive gatherings. “This is not the year to have your daughter’s friend from the city out to experience a branding,” a local news article warned. “Although calves must be branded, not taking precautions can mean the difference between life and death for some loved ones.” 

It may not be visible here, but the danger of the COVID-19 pandemic is very real, says Kim Engel, the director of the Panhandle Public Health District. As of May 5, her region had seen 55 positive cases after testing 1,063 people, most of whom have recovered, and no deaths. But with only 31 ventilators for 87,000 people across her 15,000 square mile district, even a small spike in the number of cases could quickly overwhelm the local health system. “We’re still waiting for our peak,” Engel says, emphasizing that it won’t look like the urban outbreaks that have dominated national headlines. “We are not out of the woods, and we’re afraid we are really just starting on that upward curve.”

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But as the country’s leaders talk of reopening the shuttered economy, it is precisely these regions of the U.S. that are among the most at risk. A TIME analysis of county-level COVID-19 cases shows that the virus is only just now arriving in much of rural America.

The Panhandle Public Health District covers 12 counties in western Nebraska. Other posts on health care deficits in rural Nebraska are here and here.

The Associated Press reports from Dawson, Georgia, in the region that garnered a lot of early media attention as a "rural" hotspot, even though Albany, the center of that hotspot, was not exactly rural (though surrounding Dougherty County was nonmetropolitan).  I mentioned the Albany outbreak here and here, and the New York Times major story on it is here. The headline for Claire Galofaro's AP story is "It's gone haywire:  When COVID 19 arrived in rural America."  Here's an excerpt: 

As the world’s attention was fixated on the horrors in Italy and New York City, the per capita death rates in counties in the impoverished southwest corner of Georgia climbed to among the worst in the country. The devastation here is a cautionary tale of what happens when the virus seeps into communities that have for generations remained on the losing end of the nation’s most intractable inequalities: these counties are rural, mostly African American and poor.

But Dawson is more rural--though no more poor--than Albany. Galofaro makes this point, though not as a contrast to Albany, which is the county seat of Dougherty County.   Indeed, both are part of the "Black belt," meaning they are counties with a majority African American population.  More than 60% of Terrell County, of which Dawson is the county seat, is African American, and more than 70% of more populous Dougherty County is.