COVID-19 Update

As predicted, the real shit hits the fan once the monster has grown beyond the townfolk and begins to creep into the nether reaches of the forest.

eg: Things have stabilized a little in Mumbai, but India is now the world leader in New Cases because the disease has moved on to the rural areas.

Which is what's been happening here in USAmerica Inc lately as well.

Which is exactly what the "alarmists" have been warning us would happen, and - surprise surprise - what President Stoopid told us wouldn't happen.

Which is also one reason we're likely to see a big surge in the coming months, as the thing bounces back into the cities.

WaPo:

This rural Virginia community thought it could escape the pandemic. Now, it has among the highest number of new cases in the state.

ST. PAUL, Va. — In the brightest red corner of Virginia, where "Trump Digs Coal" signs dot the Appalachian mountain hollers, Jerry Estep first brushed off the coronavirus as an urban plague. Now he won't leave home in this tiny town, population 980, without a mask.

“I was just going out like normal, but that’s not normal no more,” said Estep, 77, a retired florist with longtime health woes that could make a case of the coronavirus especially lethal. “I thought we were immune to it because we’re a small, rural area. But it has caught up.”

It took awhile for the global pandemic to wind its way through crooked mountain roads to the coalfields of far Southwest Virginia, but it’s spiking here now. The isolated region, which is trying to replace its dying coal economy with one based on outdoor tourism and higher education, is the only part of the state where case numbers have been climbing steadily all summer.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D) said on Tuesday that he is worried about the Southwest, where the average of 229 new cases each day rivals the 251 per day seen in far more populous Northern Virginia.

“This is especially concerning for a region where there are fewer hospitals,” he said.

The virus has taken hold in communities where up to 80 percent of voters backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton four years ago. The region’s cultural independence, and allegiance to a president who called virus warnings a “hoax” meant to undermine him, initially presented a challenge to health officials across the Southwest.

“People are stubborn, and a lot of people buy into the, ‘Oh, this is going to go away after the election,’ and, ‘This is not real,’ ” said Pam Chambers, who works at the Food City supermarket in St. Paul, which straddles Wise and Russell counties — two of the 36 communities that state health officials include in their expansive definition of the Southwest, stretching from east of Lynchburg to the Cumberland Gap.

Frank Kilgore, a St. Paul attorney and civic booster, was the rare Southwest Virginian who wore a mask in public right from the start. Sporting one in the local hardware store early on, he got strange looks and a ribbing from a longtime buddy in line with him at the checkout.

“I felt like a sissy,” said Kilgore, 68. “I go in there and was treated like one, too. ‘You want us to carry that nail out for you?’ ”

But attitudes toward pandemic precautions have begun to shift as the number of local cases has risen. Chambers started handing out masks to Food City shoppers just after Memorial Day, and so far, she said, only three have refused: a teenager with asthma and two elderly coal miners with black lung disease.

“I’m a Harley guy. I’m bearded. I don’t have a gun — I have an armory,” said one retired Wise County resident who wears a mask over his long gray beard and spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy. “ ‘Macho,’ to me, is a word. It will get you nowhere, except probably into trouble. So if there’s some way or some minute possibility of taking care of yourself, what’s the harm in doing it? I mean, I don’t want to be laying there in the hospital with both lungs clogged up with this crap saying, ‘I wish I’d done that.’ ”

The state’s first cases of the novel coronavirus were detected in March, in Northern Virginia and other population centers. At the pointy tip of the state, where it meets Tennessee and Kentucky, the threat seemed hundreds of miles away.

The chief worry here was why, with no local cases, they had to comply with Northam’s statewide emergency orders to shutter schools and certain businesses. The regional economy was already struggling before the virus, with per capita incomes $20,000 or less in Lee, Dickenson, Wise and Buchanan counties, the four poorest in the region.

Never fans of government mandates, local leaders were already primed to resist new rules out of Richmond, where Democrats consolidated legislative and executive power this year for the first time in a generation. As Democrats prepared to enact sweeping gun-control legislation in January, leaders across the Southwest promised defiance, declaring their counties “Second Amendment sanctuaries” where the new laws would not be enforced. Pandemic restrictions were greeted in much the same way.

Then came the outbreak at Mountain Mission School, a 99-year-old Christian boarding school for orphans and other children in need in the Buchanan County town of Grundy. Middle school teacher Russ Hertzog was the county’s first case.

Forty-two and normally in good health, Hertzog was driving home from the supermarket on March 23 when he was suddenly overcome by fatigue.

“I just felt so exhausted that I couldn’t even carry the groceries in,” said Hertzog, who thought he had the flu. The local urgent care facility told him it wasn’t covid-19 because he did not have a cough. After an agonizing week of chills and fever, his wife drove him an hour — into Kentucky — to get the nearest coronavirus test. He got the news on April 1: positive.

Hertzog, who lives on campus and had not traveled, had no idea where he’d picked up the virus. But it soon spread at the school, which has 54 faculty members, many of whom live on campus, some in residence halls along with the school’s 175 students. In all, 13 students and four staffers got it. None had to be hospitalized.

“It took a good month before we were in the clear,” said Chris Mitchell, the school’s president, who recalled state health officials descending in haz-mat suits. “We definitely got to know the health department on a first-name basis.”

Mitchell embraced and enforced all of the health officials’ orders — grouping students and staff into “pods” that did not mix with others on campus. He followed strict rules at his own, off-campus house, showering in the garage before entering and limiting himself to the basement so he didn’t potentially expose his wife and daughter. He even swapped his phone’s standard-issue ringtone for a reminder in the form of 1980s pop: The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.”

In response to the outbreak at the school, the Buchanan County Board of Supervisors took a hard line, too. On April 14, it passed an ordinance far stricter than anything ordered by Northam, whose statewide mask order would not come for another five weeks.

In addition to requiring masks in stores, the board closed all county parks and offices, prohibited more than one person per household from shopping in a store at the same time, limited the number of store customers to 20 percent capacity and prohibited non-county residents from visiting for more than 24 hours, except for work. The sheriff was authorized to conduct traffic checkpoints to enforce the order. Violators could face misdemeanor charges, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.

The backlash was swift and fierce among community members, many of whom believed the outbreak could be contained at the school. On social media, critics warned of “government overreach” and something even more ominous in rugged mountain culture, which the mask-wearing Kilgore ran into in the hardware store: the perceived “sissy” factor.

“Once you lose your rights you are not getting them back,” one resident wrote on Facebook. “The people I see being the biggest advocates of this are women and effeminate men.”

On May 4, the supervisors rescinded the order. Board member Trey Adkins said in an interview last week that the board reversed itself not because of public pressure, which he attributed to a vocal minority, but because the virus seemed to have been fully contained at the school.

“Our numbers looked good,” Adkins said.

Then came the summer vacation season, with locals traveling to Virginia Beach, Myrtle Beach and other hot spots.

As cases started spiking in June, more residents started embracing safety measures, said Sue Cantrell, director of the health district that covers part of the Southwest, including Lee, Scott and Wise counties. But that has not stopped the spread entirely.

“[M]ore people in the region are wearing masks and adhering to physical distancing, but they continue to see cases linked to family gatherings and celebrations, faith community meetings, including regular services as well as funerals and weddings where mitigation measures are not followed,” she wrote in an email. “There continue to be cases from congregate settings. We have seen cases and then secondary cases in close contacts related to travel into east Tennessee for shopping, medical appointments etc.”

The region’s institutions of higher learning — some of them fairly new and science-oriented — have adopted strict safety precautions, although it’s not clear that people in the community take their cues from the schools. Veterinary students at DeBusk Veterinary Teaching Center in Lee County wore masks one recent afternoon even as they met outside in a field, for hands-on instruction on treating horses.

Appalachian College of Pharmacy in Buchanan County launched the fall semester with students seated six feet apart where they could be, and separated by plastic barriers where they couldn’t. Appalachian School of Law, also in Buchanan, moved some classes into empty retail space by the Grundy Walmart to allow for more space between students.

On a recent weekday afternoon, nearly every shopper at the Walmart wore a mask. Albert Cook, 65, a retired coal miner browsing hunting shirts, said he did so as a sign of respect for store workers.

“If they’ve got to wear it for 12 hours, I can wear it for 20 minutes,” he said.

Even as masks are beginning to catch on, Adkins, the Buchanan County supervisor, worries that the region could face “a major outbreak” as schools there and many other Southwest counties open Tuesday for in-person instruction, with an online option. He has a personal connection to a local covid-19 victim: One of the county’s two deaths was his father-in-law’s first cousin.

“It’s not a hoax,” he said. “Anybody with common sense will tell you that.”

But even after the rise in cases hit the region, not everyone feels precautions are necessary. Wanda Stinson, shopping maskless at Walmart, said some measures go overboard. She noted that her husband has been forced to wear extra protective gear at the coal mines, but still had his overtime cut so the mines can be disinfected between shifts.

“None of it makes sense,” said Stinson, 47. “If the gloves work, if the masks work, why do you need the disinfectant? . . . I honestly think it’s all political.”

Jennifer Stiltner also went into the store without a mask, accompanied by her three children, Shawn, 17; Dakota, 12; and Emily, 7. Stiltner said she and her family find the masks uncomfortable — especially Shawn, who has autism. She put more stock in religious faith to keep them healthy.

“I pray every day for protection, that God protects us and watches over us,” she said. “I don’t think anybody wants to get it, but if we do, we know he’ll watch over us and keep us safe.”