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Rural KY counties are becoming COVID hot spots

The Daily Yonder has been tracking the impact of the pandemic on rural counties across the country for some time. Each week they update their Rural Red Zone map, showing rural counties where the infection rate is 100 or more new cases per 100,000 population. (Follow that link to see the map for the entire country.)

This is a better indicator than just raw case numbers, because if a county has a low population, they could have a high infection rate but a low number of cases compared to, say, Jefferson County.

Daily Yonder divides counties into Metro and Non-Metro counties, then further divides them into counties with infection rates below 100-per-100,000 and infection rates above 100-per-100,000.

We pulled out the Kentucky part of the map, and it’s obvious that it is the rural counties of Kentucky that are becoming the hot spots for coronavirus infections.

Covid-19 Red Zones, October 4-10

Red-zone counties have a one-week infection rate of 100 or more new cases per 100,000 population.

▉ Non-metro Red Zone
▉ Metro Red Zone		 ▉ Non-metro, new infection rate below 100 per 100k
▉ Metro, new infection rate below 100 per 100k
 ▉ Non-metro, no new cases
▉ Metro, no new cases

Rural rates of infection and deaths versus share of population

Another scary fact is that while the initial surge of cases and deaths was concentrated in the cities, now it’s moving to the rural areas of the country. How do we know? Again, by taking cases and deaths and plotting them against a normalized population count.

In the beginning, rural areas had lower shares of cases and deaths than their share of the population. That has changed. Look at these two graphs.

 

Weekly Percent of New Covid-19 Cases Originating in Rural (Nonmetro) Counties Weekly new Covid-19 infections from nonmetro counties as a percent of all new U.S. infections. The blue line shows the percent of U.S. population that lives in nonmetro (rural) counties. The date refers to Saturdays and covers the previous seven-day period.

Covid-19-related deaths in nonmetro counties as a percent of all new U.S. Covid-19 deaths, Sunday to Saturday. The date refers to Saturdays. The blue line shows the percent of U.S. population that lives in nonmetro (rural) counties (14%).

Change in county count by week

Daily Yonder also tracks the change in each state by week. For the last week in their tracking data, here are the numbers for Kentucky:

  • Number of rural counties:  85
  • Number of those counties in the red zone:  53
  • Percent of rural counties in the red zone: 62%
  • Change in rural red zone county count from previous week: Up 10 (third worst in the country)
  • Rural counties in the red zone more than 5 weeks in a row: 4

So, we’ve only had four rural counties in the red zone for over 5 weeks solid – but we have 53 rural counties in the red zone now. That’s a pretty significant increase.

Rural counties in Kentucky need to get serious about the coronavirus

As we all know, there are some rural counties that are working at knocking down the virus, and there are some that are not. Too many people think “it’s a Louisville problem” or “it can’t happen here, we’re too spread out.”

Apparently, it IS happening here, and it’s happening in our rural counties. Elected officials and community leaders need to take a stand, knock down the misinformation, and get the virus under control in their county. Otherwise, we will continue to see cases increase, and our hospitals will become overloaded. Time to get serious about rural COVID-19.

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