Another day of solitary rural contentment here, another day of logarithmicly rising Coronavirus case counts. West Virginia finally ‘fessed up to a case, and Fargo got it’s first case so no more runs to that frontier of the Costco supply chain. Testing volume is increasing, though constrained in some areas by shortages of supplies. In a few states I’m seeing where the testing is being done and that may explain the cases or lack of cases in some rural areas where there probably are cases- For example rural southeastern Minnesota shows cases in the area Mayo Clinic serves and they’ve been actively testing, but no cases in the northern half of the state. The same pattern is seen in many coal country counties and over half of Arkansas counties, mostly rural, have reported no tests.
I’m also seeing continuing denial here in rural Trump country- While our wise democratic governor Walz has closed schools, restaurants, etc.. to slow the pandemic, the local republican public officials out here are pretending it’s “business as usual”. For example, while Minneapolis’ website has pages of details on the Coronavirus pandemic, many of our county websites out here make no mention.
Here’s some links to data from the 14 mostly rural continental states and Minnesota with details, and a couple other useful websites.
Links to data and state resources:
Alabama: From 1 to 39 cases in 4 days, most in Birmingham and other metros, only 67 tested.
Arkansas: Behind the curve- 22 cases with at least 5 in rural counties/ less that 200 tests done.
Iowa: 23 cases, 6 in rural counties, 15 in Iowa City area, number of tests not released.
Kentucky: 26 cases, 380 tested. At least 8 from rural counties, no tests in several coal counties.
Maine: 32 cases, 1300+ tests! At least 11-12 from outside Portland and Bangor metros
Minnesota: 60 cases, over 2000 tests! 40+ cases in MSP metro, cases in 4 rural counties.
Mississippi: 21 cases, 389 tests. 8 cases in rural counties.
Montana: 9 cases after over 300 tests, no geographic data available.
North Dakota: 3 cases, 300+ tests. 2nd case near Minot and the first in the Fargo area.
New Hampshire: 26 cases, ? tests, lousy website.
Oklahoma: 17 cases, ~300 tests. Cases in 3 rural counties.
South Dakota: 11 cases, 500+ tests. Spread across the southern ½ or state, 5 in rural counties.
Vermont: 10 cases, 500+ tests. Little geographic data but at least 1 is from a rural county.
West Virginia: Finally… 1 case after barely 100 tests, WV you ain’t testin’ hard enough!
Wyoming: 11 cases after 100+ tests, concentrated in 1 urban county and 2 rural.
Neat site with data for every state, territories, etc.
Another neat site with localized data- We need more of these to track this pandemic!
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