Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXXVIII): Mariposa, California

The Los Angeles Times reported a few days ago out of Mariposa County, California, population 18,251, about an impressive nonmetro county government  health response to the coronavirus.  Journalist Kevin Baxter describes Dr. Eric Sergienko, the county health officer, and his response to the county's first case, a 23-year-old woman.  Baxter writes:

Though the case marked the arrival of a potentially deadly pathogen, it also allowed Sergienko to launch a contact-tracing system he had been working on for weeks, one of the final planks of a well-constructed response platform the county has been building for months.

A really interesting aspect of the story is how responding to the coronavirus parallels responding to a major wildfire, which Mariposa County has more experience with.

If the pandemic’s rapid and deadly spread across the U.S. has exposed government incompetence and lack of preparation in other communities, in Mariposa County the tiny Health and Human Services Agency has offered a textbook example of how to handle a crisis. 

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And when Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in mid-March that all Californians were being required to stay at home as much as possible, the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office, utilizing lessons it had learned during the Detwiler fire that swept through the area nearly three years earlier, immediately alerted the county’s 18,000 residents, spread over more than 1,400 square miles, to heed the order.

Baxter notes that the minimum rural lot size in the county is 5 acres, so the idea of social distancing wasn't as hard a sell as one might expect.  Baxter quotes Chevon Kothari, the director of Mariposa Health and Human Services Agency:

We were ready for this.  We worked together as a team during previous disasters, so we already had some of this planning process in place. But in addition, we’ve had the luxury of time to not have cases early on. So we had the ability to plan.

Sergienko first heard of the coronavirus in China on New Year's Eve, and two weeks later, he and Kothari were warning the Mariposa County Board of Supervisors and making plans for what to do if and when the virus reached their corner of the Sierra-Nevada.  And they were pretty sure it would reach Mariposa because 4.5 million people pass through each year en route to the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park, which is in Mariposa County.  Among other actions, the county trained sheriff's detectives in contact tracing.  When the first case was reported in late April, the plan was implemented. 

I love the small-town manageability and preparedness angles if this story, which were also reflected in this story out of Oklahoma from late March.

On a national note, here is a quote about rural from today's coronavirus coverage in the New York Times:

Rural towns that one month ago were unscathed are suddenly hot spots for the virus. It is rampaging through nursing homes, meatpacking plants and prisons, killing the medically vulnerable and the poor, and new outbreaks keep emerging in grocery stores, Walmarts or factories, an ominous harbinger of what a full reopening of the economy will bring.

While dozens of rural counties have no known coronavirus cases, a panoramic view of the country reveals a grim and distressing picture.