When the Coronavirus Comes to Rural Georgia

[Guno צְבִי]

Kinsell runs her small private clinic out of a former Tastee-Freez. She is the only doctor in Clay County, where forty per cent of the population lives under the poverty line. She has a unique view of rural health care in times of normalcy as well as crisis, and I’ve spoken to her periodically over the years. “We have more older people,” Kinsell told me yesterday, “and they tend to be sicker.” Kinsell has not yet seen a case of covid-19 at her clinic, nor has anyone asked her to be tested yet, though she is bracing for that eventuality. In the meantime, she worries as much about the spread of information as the spread of the virus. Clay County does not have a dedicated paper of its own—it qualifies as a so-called news desert. “We started a monthly not long ago,” Kinsell told me. “It’s mailed to every address in Clay County. So there will be an article in it next month about this.” That story may be a bit “stale” by that point, she said, laughing. “We’d like to make the paper more online,” she added.



On Friday, after this post was published, Kinsell shut her clinic. “Have a headache and achy today, no fever yet, so closed the office,” she said. “We just got the test kits, so I did one. Guy just called with 104 temp, directed him to E.R.” The emergency room is an hour’s drive from town.

Now, if you seriously thought somebody was seriously ill, short of breath, you’d send them on to the hospital, either forty miles away in Alabama or sixty miles away in Albany, for a ventilator or something. Of course, there aren’t enough ventilators in this country to deal with the demand if this really hits hard. And with our current testing limitations, most people are probably never going to be tested.


https://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/when-the-coronavirus-comes-to-rural-georgia

 

[anonymoose]

Kinsell runs her small private clinic out of a former Tastee-Freez. She is the only doctor in Clay County, where forty per cent of the population lives under the poverty line. She has a unique view of rural health care in times of normalcy as well as crisis, and I’ve spoken to her periodically over the years. “We have more older people,” Kinsell told me yesterday, “and they tend to be sicker.” Kinsell has not yet seen a case of covid-19 at her clinic, nor has anyone asked her to be tested yet, though she is bracing for that eventuality. In the meantime, she worries as much about the spread of information as the spread of the virus. Clay County does not have a dedicated paper of its own—it qualifies as a so-called news desert. “We started a monthly not long ago,” Kinsell told me. “It’s mailed to every address in Clay County. So there will be an article in it next month about this.” That story may be a bit “stale” by that point, she said, laughing. “We’d like to make the paper more online,” she added.



On Friday, after this post was published, Kinsell shut her clinic. “Have a headache and achy today, no fever yet, so closed the office,” she said. “We just got the test kits, so I did one. Guy just called with 104 temp, directed him to E.R.” The emergency room is an hour’s drive from town.

Now, if you seriously thought somebody was seriously ill, short of breath, you’d send them on to the hospital, either forty miles away in Alabama or sixty miles away in Albany, for a ventilator or something. Of course, there aren’t enough ventilators in this country to deal with the demand if this really hits hard. And with our current testing limitations, most people are probably never going to be tested.


https://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/when-the-coronavirus-comes-to-rural-georgia

Do you think this will kill off the remaining half of the population that hasn't been killed off by guns by say, June?