Biden says pandemic is over, but that's not so in Appalachia

New York Times map, adapted by The Rural Blog; for the interactive version and county list, click here.

Screenshot of Times' top 20, labeled; click it to enlarge

President Biden said in an interview telecast on CBS's "60 Minutes" Sunday night, “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. It’s – but the pandemic is over.” Not everywhere, Mr. President.

A widely accepted definition of a pandemic is the widespread presence of a disease over a wide geographic area, affecting a significant portion of the population. That leaves plenty of gray area, but it’s clear that there is still a pandemic in Central Appalachia, which consists primarily of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, and some other rural areas around the nation.

The Mountain State ranks first in the nation for the rate of new cases in the last seven days, and on The New York Times county-level map, Eastern Kentucky is redder than West Virginia. As a whole, Kentucky ranks ninth among the states; a week ago, it ranked first.

Chambers County, Texas, across Trinity Bay from Houston, ranks first on the Times list. The next six, and 15 of the top 20, are in Central Appalachia. After that come Athens County, Ohio; Upshur County, W.Va.; and Boyd and Greenup counties in Kentucky. Several other West Virginia and Kentucky counties are in the Times' list of the top 100.

More broadly, an end-of-pandemic declaration "is hard to believe given an average of 400 Americans are dying each day," writes Katelyn Jetelina in her Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter. "But, as I’ve written before, the 'end of a pandemic' isn’t purely epidemiological, but also physiological, cultural, political, and moral. Essentially we’re collectively deciding where we place SARS-CoV-2 in our repertoire of threats. To me, this winter will be a true test as to whether we are still in an 'emergency' phase, at least if we define this by deaths, hospitalizations, and health-care capacity," as opposed to infection rates and "long Covid," examined in this report from Kentucky Health News.