Epicenter of pandemic has shifted to rural areas, especially those with meatpacking plants and prisons

Daily Yonder chart; click the image to enlarge it.

Though major urban areas are seeing the most covid-19 cases, the infection rate is spiking in rural areas, which are less equipped to deal with it, Lous Parshley reports for Vox.

"The epicenter of this outbreak really has shifted into the smaller rural areas," Angela Hewlett, associate professor in infectious disease at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said in a recent Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing. Parshley writes, "Testing in many less-populous areas has lagged even further behind the already-low national average, obscuring the extent of transmission in more sparsely populated areas."

Rural residents are, on average, more vulnerable to the pandemic because of health-care and health inequalities, plus the prevalence of jobs where social distancing is all but impossible. Parshley notes that farmworkers and meatpacking workers, who are often undocumented immigrants, are particularly vulnerable since they don't have much access to personal protective equipment or paid sick leave, yet are often required to work in close quarters.

Rural counties with meatpacking plants or prisons are "major hotspots" for the pandemic in rural America. "Meanwhile, counties where farming or mining undergird the economy have the lowest rates of infection," Tim Marema reports for The Daily Yonder.