Coronavirus is coming for the red states too
Myth: Red America has been spared.
Reality: Coronavirus is coming for red America too.
Andrew RomanoWest Coast Correspondent,Yahoo News•May 6, 2020
It’s no secret that blue states, with their big, dense cities and heavily trafficked transportation hubs, have borne the brunt of this pandemic. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report released in late April, the number of infections and deaths per capita in states with Democratic governors were (respectively) more than double and triple the corresponding rates in states with Republican governors.
But the same report told a different story when it came to the direction the virus was heading. While blue-state cases had increased 63 percent from April 13 to April 27, red-state cases had increased 91 percent; while blue-state deaths had increased 104 percent, red-state deaths had increased 170 percent.
That gap has likely widened since late April. According to the New York Times, the only states where daily cases are clearly declining are on the post-peak Eastern Seaboard (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware), in the sparse Mountain West (Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, South Dakota, Colorado) or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (Hawaii). With the exception of Arkansas, the rest of the country is either plateauing or climbing, and some of the sharpest upticks seem to be in places like Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Minnesota.
A site called Rt.live (which was developed by the co-founder of Instagram) confirms this development. By tracking Rt — the effective growth rate of the virus as expressed by the estimated number of people one infected person subsequently goes on to infect — Rt.live is able to gauge, roughly, how COVID-19 is spreading at the state level. Rt values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area; values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer. (Rt is similar to the more-familiar R0, but the former measures real-time changes in the virus’s spread; R0 — or “R-naught” — is a fixed value inherent to a particular disease.)
The four states with the highest current Rt values are Nebraska (1.06), Minnesota (1.06), Wyoming (1.03) and Iowa (1.02). Wisconsin and Kansas are also at or above 1.0, and most other rural states show a possible range of Rt values that cross the 1.0 threshold.
The news from the heartland jibes with these numbers. Dakota County, Neb., had no known cases as recently as April 11. Now, driven by outbreaks at meat-processing plants, it has the third-most cases per capita in the country. Trousdale County, Tenn., another rural area, suddenly finds itself with the nation’s highest per capita infection rate by far. “A prison appears responsible for a huge spike in cases,” reports the New York Times. “In 10 days, this county of about 11,000 residents saw its known cases skyrocket to 1,344 from 27.”
Other hot-spot counties include Nobles, Minn. (home of the JBS pork plant); Cass, Ind. (a Tyson meatpacking plant); and Moore, Texas (a JBS Beef meatpacking plant), where the known infection rate of 19.91 per 1,000 residents far outpaces every other county in the state and is roughly 13 times higher than the rate in the Houston metro area.
Anyone tempted to dismiss these rural outbreaks as outliers confined to prisons and plants, where social distancing is all but impossible, should think again. That may be where they start. It isn’t necessarily where they end.
As the Texas Tribune recently reported, the “spread of the virus is not isolated to the meatpacking plant floors, reaching out into communities when workers wrap up their shifts and head home. Members of the community in Moore County, including church workers whose family members work at the plant, have also tested positive.” New outbreaks keep emerging in grocery stores, Walmarts, nursing homes and factories as well.
Instead, these new rural hot spots should probably be seen as harbingers of things to come — what happens when restrictions are relaxed and people resume assembling in the midst of a pandemic, long before the advent of a vaccine.
People walk through Central Park in Pella, Iowa, on Sunday. (Jack Kurtz/Zuma Wire)
Which is happening a lot faster in red states than blue states — even in red states, like Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Indiana and so on, where the daily infection and death rates are still going up.
This isn’t to say Nebraska, with its much smaller and more dispersed population, is the next New York. But the risks remain. Twenty percent of nonmetro residents are older than 65, compared to 15 percent in metro areas, and rural residents under 65 are more likely to have preexisting health conditions (26 percent) compared to their urban counterparts (20 percent).
Meanwhile, as states reopen, their capacity to contain flare-ups will depend on their ability to test, trace and isolate infections. But rural states are less prepared for that complex public health challenge, and isolated hospitals lack the capacity to meet a surge of patients needing ICUs.
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