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.
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. https://t.co/oB5rKTR8mG
— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 30, 2021
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.
A terribly sad statistic, thanks in part to vaccine denialism and little mask-wearing. Not sure how politicians in rural America live with the legacy. @KHNews' @LaurenWeberHP for @NBCNews https://t.co/LtopWju1ja
— Elisabeth Rosenthal (@RosenthalHealth) September 30, 2021
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,…Read more…
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I bear no malice towards these people. They are bound by ignorance and a need to believe, and as such are easy prey.
Crazy US evangelicals are simply never going to believe this. Most of them already believe that the Earth was created exactly 6025 years ago and that the Sun is its planet. Their charlatan pastors keep telling them that not only did Trump “win” the last election, but Jesus is the cure for COVID-19. The fiends who first deployed this US bioweapon in China have been deploying the delta variant of it all over the red states where vaccination rates are low and people run around without masks. It has been wildly successful.
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