Rural Americans Are Vulnerable to the Coronavirus

Guno צְבִי

Guno צְבִי

We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Rural workers are less likely to have access to paid sick leave than urban workers. Many individuals may be working several jobs so, for them, staying home is not financially feasible. Some companies have encouraged their employees to work from home in order to reduce the chance of transmission, but that isn’t feasible for individuals that don’t have reliable, high-speed internet access at home. Many more Americans work jobs that cannot be performed remotely.


The spate of rural hospital closures and other health institutions further put these communities at a severe disadvantage as the rest of the country takes steps to combat the spread of the virus. How can someone contact their health professional when hospital closures have led these same professionals to leave the community? A viral outbreak is especially challenging for persons with disabilities because they already struggle with limited access to health care services. As rural hospitals continue to close without suitable replacements, rural folks will lack critical services to help them fend off any outbreak of COVID-19.


https://www.americanprogress.org/is...340/rural-communities-vulnerable-coronavirus/
 
Infrastructure-wise, this is true.

There's another side to this, however. The advantage that rural people have is distance. Pandemics usually start and spread fastest in urban environments. The more people you cram into a small area, and the more that people use mass transit, the worse the spread of disease can be (if the disease is airborne).

So, while rural people are more screwed when they get infected, they're less likely to get infected than someone living in a densely populated area.
 
"Rural workers are less likely to have access to paid sick leave than urban workers."

That's interesting because the biggest complaints in the Bay Area and L.A. are the large number of service workers who will get crushed by closures, at risk of losing their apartments, etc. etc.
 
Woko Haram said:
Infrastructure-wise, this is true.

There's another side to this, however. The advantage that rural people have is distance. Pandemics usually start and spread fastest in urban environments. The more people you cram into a small area, and the more that people use mass transit, the worse the spread of disease can be (if the disease is airborne).

So, while rural people are more screwed when they get infected, they're less likely to get infected than someone living in a densely populated area.
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Do you really think guno cares about facts???
 
PostmodernProphet said:
Good thing they are also less likely to get it......
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Yep. They'll be okay.

trump-supporters-in-5b5d9c.jpg
 
Really depends on where you are. All rural areas are not created equal. I live in a rural area myself. Here in rural Wisconsin it is actually more likely that I have better internet quality than you do, a better educational system, just as good or better healthcare access, I could go on and on. There is rural West Virginia and then there is rural other parts of the country. They are usually two different things. :)
 
Woko Haram said:
Infrastructure-wise, this is true.

There's another side to this, however. The advantage that rural people have is distance. Pandemics usually start and spread fastest in urban environments. The more people you cram into a small area, and the more that people use mass transit, the worse the spread of disease can be (if the disease is airborne).

So, while rural people are more screwed when they get infected, they're less likely to get infected than someone living in a densely populated area.
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They are not spread out at work, restaurants, and churches. They come together. They have longer distances to get healthcare and it is often substandard.
 
Though government health agencies may instruct the public on how to combat COVID-19, they don’t give them the capacity or tools to do it. For rural America, which has a higher proportion of people vulnerable to the virus—including those who are older and those with disabilities—these resources are sorely lacking.
 
How the coronavirus is affecting rural America


“School closures preventing parents from going to work and caring for their animals are already a concern in farm and plant communities,” said NPPC President Howard “A.V.” Roth, a hog farmer from Wauzeka, Wisconsin. “The specter of market-ready hogs with nowhere to go is a nightmare for every pork producer in the nation. It would result in severe economic fallout in rural communities and a major animal welfare challenge.”

The U.S. pork industry relies on foreign labor and needs a stable workforce. Even without the additional challenge presented by COVID-19, the labor shortage threatens to increase production costs and food prices for consumers. Existing visa programs are designed for seasonal agriculture, and reform is needed to address the animal care and other requirements of year-round livestock agriculture.

In addition to the pork industry, consumers are reportedly avoiding touching fresh fruits and vegetables and stocking up on more canned food and packaged items due to the coronavirus.

https://www.agdaily.com/news/coronavirus-affecting-rural-america/

pork gobblers lament
 
Nordberg said:
They are not spread out at work, restaurants, and churches. They come together. They have longer distances to get healthcare and it is often substandard.
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Sure, rural people still attend gatherings and have places where they can interact with other people, but typically, pandemics originate overseas, not in the US. So the places they reach first are major cities with international travel. It usually takes a while before a pandemic reaches a rural area.

And frankly, by the time most rural areas are affected by a pandemic, the major cities are in bad shape. If a pandemic lasts multiple months or weeks to the point that rural areas are mostly affected, this involves hundreds of thousands (if not millions) infected in the major cities.

So while it is true that rural folk do have fewer resources to work with, they are better positioned to avoid infection in the first place. The more isolated the rural community is, the less likely the community will interact with someone from the city that is infected.
 
guno said:
How the coronavirus is affecting rural America


“School closures preventing parents from going to work and caring for their animals are already a concern in farm and plant communities,” said NPPC President Howard “A.V.” Roth, a hog farmer from Wauzeka, Wisconsin. “The specter of market-ready hogs with nowhere to go is a nightmare for every pork producer in the nation. It would result in severe economic fallout in rural communities and a major animal welfare challenge.”

The U.S. pork industry relies on foreign labor and needs a stable workforce. Even without the additional challenge presented by COVID-19, the labor shortage threatens to increase production costs and food prices for consumers. Existing visa programs are designed for seasonal agriculture, and reform is needed to address the animal care and other requirements of year-round livestock agriculture.

In addition to the pork industry, consumers are reportedly avoiding touching fresh fruits and vegetables and stocking up on more canned food and packaged items due to the coronavirus.

https://www.agdaily.com/news/coronavirus-affecting-rural-america/

pork gobblers lament
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This basically just shows that Big Agro depends too much on foreign labor. If they went back to hiring locals, visas wouldn't be an issue. Granted, they're too cheap to do that.
 
Being a City person myself rural life is not for me. But I look around at everything being shut down in SF and the Bay Area because of coronavirus and the massive opioid epidemic we have in SF and I'm really wondering why some of you are sh*tting on rural folk.
 
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