'It's gone haywire': When COVID-19 arrived in rural America
DAWSON, Ga. (AP) — The reverend approached the makeshift pulpit and asked the Lord to help him make sense of the scene before him: two caskets, side by side, in a small-town cemetery busier now than ever before.
Rev. Willard O. Weston had already eulogized other neighbors lost to COVID-19, and he would do more. But this one stood as a symbol to him of all they had lost. The matching caskets, one powder blue, one white and gold, contained a couple married 30 years who died two days apart, unaware of the other’s fate.
As the world’s attention was fixated on the horrors in Italy and New York City, the per capita death rates in counties in the impoverished southwest corner of Georgia quietly climbed to among the worst in the county. The devastation here is a cautionary tale of what happens when the virus seeps into communities on the losing end of the nation’s most intractable inequalities: these counties are rural, mostly African American and poor
More than a quarter of people in Terrell County live in poverty, the local hospital shuttered decades ago, and businesses have been closing for years, sending many young and able fleeing for cities. Those left behind are sicker and more vulnerable, with more of the underlying health conditions that make coronavirus so deadly.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/its-gone-haywire-when-covid-19-arrived-in-rural-america/ar-BB13FQ4L?li=BBnb7Kz
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