Rural county has nation's highest covid-19 rate; some special factors, but still a warning to the nation, ER doc says

Blaine County (Wikipedia)

Blaine County, Idaho, population 22,000, has 410 covid-19 cases, the highest rate in the nation, probably because it is a ski-resort area with many visitors from the Seattle area, a hotbed of the pandemic. But it is still a warning sign to other rural counties.

So said Dr. Brent Russell, an emergency physician at St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center in Ketchum, in an interview with CNN this morning. Russell said small towns have a strong sense of community, with close personal relations, but "in this situation we're all soldiers in this war, and it needs to be fought on all fronts. Right now, extreme social distancing is what we have to do, at least until we get a grip on what's going on here." Lack of testing has made that difficult nationwide.

"It's going to go through all of rural America, and people need to be prepared," said Russell, a covid-19 victim himself. "I was sicker that I've ever been, and I would not wish this on anybody," he said.

"Russell wrote a letter to the local Idaho Mountain Express pleading with a community that, in his view, was either unable or unwilling to adapt to the new rules of the pandemic," Michael Ames, a former Express reporter, reports for The New Yorker. “People were not taking this seriously,” Russell told Ames. “I would look out the windows of my house and see groups of people talking and congregating in the street.”

Russell told CNN that the Wood River hospital was able to cope with the large number of cases because "We were able to transfer all our patients out . . . to towns that have not been hit hard. That's not gonna be the case in other small towns."