The pandemic that first struck in major metropolises is now increasingly finding its front line in the country's rural areas; counties with acres of farmland, cramped meatpacking plants, out-of-the-way prisons and few hospital beds.



In rural areas, where 60 million Americans live, populations are poorer, older and more prone to health problems such as diabetes and obesity than those of urban areas.

Many of these communities are isolated and hard to reach. They were largely spared from the disease shutting down their states - until, suddenly, they weren't. Rural counties now have some of the highest rates of covid-19 cases and deaths in the country, topping even the hardest-hit New York City boroughs and signaling a new phase of the pandemic - one of halting, scattered outbreaks that could devastate still more of America's most vulnerable towns as states lift stay-at-home orders.


It is coming, and it's going to be more of a checkerboard," said Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University in Ohio. "It's not going to be a wave that spreads out uniformly over all of rural America; it's going to be hot spots that come and go. And I don't know how well they're going to be managed."


https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/...e-15292024.php