Rural Covid-19 death rate is twice as high as urban rate; new rural coronavirus infections fell 5% in past week

New coronavirus infections, in ranges by county, Sept. 5-11
Daily Yonder map; click the image to enlarge it or click here for the interactive version.

After approaching January's record high, new rural coronavirus infections fell by 5 percent during the week of Sept. 5-11. But deaths related to Covid-19 kept rising, and the rural Covid death rate is now twice as high as the urban rate, Tim Murphy and Tim Marema report for The Daily Yonder.

New rural cases fell by about 10,000 from the week before, bringing new rural infections to just under 200,000. And 24 of the 47 states with rural counties had all their rural counties in the red zone, meaning they had at least 100 new infections per 100,00 residents in one week. "More than 90% of the nation’s counties were in the red zone last week ... That’s nearly as high as the red-zone rate at the height of the winter peak of 2020-21," Murphy and Marema report.

Meanwhile, rural counties reported 2,210 Covid deaths, a 13 percentage point increase from the week before. "Rural residents accounted for about a quarter of all Covid-related deaths last week, even though they make up about 15% of the U.S. population," Murphy and Marema report.

Click here and here for an interactive county-level map, regional analysis and charts from the Yonder.