Covid-19 is running rampant through some workplaces, including factories and farms.
New York City is still battling America’s worst Covid-19 outbreak to date. And now, even as some states begin to consider reopening, many sparsely populated areas of rural America are seeing a worrying uptick in cases.
“The epicenter of this outbreak really has shifted into the smaller rural areas,” said Angela Hewlett, associate professor in infectious disease at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in a recent Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing. And that’s a major problem, given that the health systems of many of these places are the least equipped to deal with a sudden surge in cases.
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. As protests in largely rural states show, some people assume rural areas might be spared the worst of Covid-19 outbreaks.
Yet many people in rural regions work in large-scale industries, such as food processing, where social distancing is challenging and they’re at higher risk. “Part of the reason that we’re seeing such dramatic increases in rural communities” is because the virus is running rampant through workplaces like factories and farms, says Hewlett…
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