Via NBC News, a report by Lauren Weber of Kaiser Health News: Covid Is killing rural Americans at twice the rate of people in urban areas. Excerpt:
Rural Americans are dying of Covid at more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts — a divide that health experts say is likely to widen as access to medical care shrinks for a population that tends to be older, sicker, heavier, poorer and less vaccinated.
While the initial surge of Covid-19 deaths skipped over much of rural America, where roughly 15 percent of Americans live, nonmetropolitan mortality rates quickly started to outpace those of metropolitan areas as the virus spread nationwide before vaccinations became available, according to data from the Rural Policy Research Institute.
Since the pandemic began, about 1 in 434 rural Americans have died from Covid, compared with roughly 1 in 513 urban Americans, the institute’s data shows. And though vaccines have reduced overall Covid death rates since the winter peak, rural mortality rates are now more than double that of urban ones — and accelerating quickly.
In rural northeastern Texas, Titus Regional Medical Center CEO Terry Scoggin is grappling with a 39 percent vaccination rate in his community. Eleven patients died of Covid in the first half of September at his hospital in Mount Pleasant, population 16,000. Typically, three or four nonhospice patients die there in a whole month.
“We don’t see death like that,” Scoggin said. “You usually don’t see your friends and neighbors die.”
Part of the problem is that Covid incidence rates in September were roughly 54 percent higher in rural areas than elsewhere, said Fred Ullrich, a University of Iowa College of Public Health research analyst who co-wrote the institute’s report. He said the analysis compared the rates between nonmetropolitan, or rural, areas and metropolitan, or urban, areas. In 39 states, he added, rural counties had higher rates of Covid than their urban counterparts.
“There is a national disconnect between perception and reality when it comes to Covid in rural America,” said Alan Morgan, head of the National Rural Health Association. “We’ve turned many rural communities into kill boxes. And there's no movement towards addressing what we're seeing in many of these communities, either among the public, or among governing officials.”
Still, the high incidence of cases and low vaccination rates don’t fully capture why mortality rates are so much higher in rural areas than elsewhere. Academics and officials alike describe rural Americans’ greater rates of poor health and their limited options for medical care as a deadly combination. The pressures of the pandemic have compounded the problem by deepening staffing shortages at hospitals, creating a cycle of worsening access to care.
It's the latest example of the deadly coronavirus wreaking more havoc in some communities than others. Covid has also killed Native American, Black or Hispanic people at disproportionately high rates.
Vaccinations are the most effective way to prevent Covid infections from turning deadly. Roughly 41 percent of rural America was vaccinated as of Sept. 23, compared with about 53 percent of urban America, according to an analysis by The Daily Yonder, a newsroom covering rural America. Limited supplies and low access made shots hard to get in the far-flung regions at first, but officials and academics now blame vaccine hesitancy, misinformation and politics for the low vaccination rates.
