Social and economic disruptions in the wake of this spring’s virus will be unevenly distributed in intensity and time. Socially distanced rural suffering will long outlast the news cycle and panic.
COVID-19 is a real crisis. It is unique for being concentrated for once in places where global travelers, professionals, and creatives live. When risk for those populations is controlled to a level they can accept, expect panic and restrictions to ease. Our world happily tolerates death tolls far in excess of the worst projected for COVID-19 when only rural people or people with a high school education or less are at high risk.
Kentucky, where I live, expects our COVID-19 crisis to peak on Saturday, May 16, with 1,600 hospitalized and 240 in ICU beds on that day. By then, New York is expected to no longer need any COVID-19 beds. Their peak will have been a month and a half previous. Kentucky (more accurately, Lexington and Louisville) will probably be fine when we peak. Tennessee (e.g., Nashville and Memphis) probably won’t. Expect the news to have moved on by then.
