7 ms·

Like guns the virus is much more of a problem in urban places than rural places. Americans not in cities aren’t going to take much more of this shutdown imo.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
Shouldn't this be asterisked with a "So far"? The black plague devastated rural communities along with urban.
- ogre_codes 7y ago
  The Black Plague was spread by rodents. Coronavirus currently required a human carrier. I do agree about the "So Far" bit though, if precautions aren't taken, eventually someone will catch it and it'll spread. It's already happened in a few places. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/us/coronavirus-funeral-albany-georgia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/us/coronavirus-funeral-al...
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Those will also be the locations with less preparedness. How many small towns even have ICUs?
danharaj 7y ago
This is misguided. The capacity of the healthcare system in rural areas will be even easier to overwhelm.
- gnulinux 7y ago
  Of course it's misguided. Which country handled this crisis worse than US? Misguided is an understatement.
  - danharaj 7y ago
    If I use the words that I think are appropriate for the obstinate middlebrow skepticism of HN in the face of an uncontrolled pandemic, I get flagged :^)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - dylz 7y ago
    Maybe Brazil? > "We're all going to die one day"[0] > “I’m sorry, some people will die, they will die, that’s life,” Bolsonaro said in a television interview on Friday night. “You can’t stop a car factory because of traffic deaths.”[1] > Bolsonaro has compared the new coronavirus to a "little flu," condemned the reaction to it as "hysteria," and said Brazilians' immune systems are so strong they can swim in raw sewage and "don't catch a thing."[2] > He has called the virus a “measly cold.” “Some will die” from it, he said, because “such is life.” [3] > ..more than 20 members of Bolsonaro’s U.S. delegation have tested positive for the coronavirus. Bolsonaro ignored his own health ministry’s advice to self-isolate for a couple of weeks and to discourage large gatherings. He made a defiant show of shaking hands and taking selfies at a rally that attracted hundreds of his supporters. [4] [0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/brazils-bolsonaro-downplays-coronavirus-risks-were-all-going-to-die-one-day-2020-03-29 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/brazils-bolsonaro-downplay... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/27/world/americas/27reuters-health-coronavirus-brazil.html https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/27/world/americas/27... [2] https://www.afp.com/en/news/15/bolsonaro-takes-down-virus-shortage-video-after-uproar-doc-1qb8pu2 https://www.afp.com/en/news/15/bolsonaro-takes-down-virus-sh... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/world/americas/brazil-bolsonaro-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/world/americas/brazil-bol... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/bolsonaro-coronavirus-denial-brazil-trump/608926/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/bolsona...
  - fourmyle 7y ago
    Our death rate per capita is substantially lower than China and Italy for example.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  New York has 1,600 ICU beds; there are a bunch of counties in rural America that have zero. The CFR in these counties if the virus gets out of hand will be appalling.
- 013a 7y ago
  I think, actually, this statement is misguided, for a couple reasons. Its very likely that people are underestimating the average city's "hospital beds per capita" metric; frankly, a ton of people live in the average city (duh). Are there enough beds in many of America's tier-2 (say, Austin) and tier-3 (say, Cleveland) cities to cover all of the population? By comparison, outside of cities, the spread will be far, far slower than within. Yes, healthcare is worse, but there's an order of magnitude fewer cases. People travel less. They go to the store once every two weeks, not every 4 days, even when there isn't a quarantine. They don't visit the new hipster restaurant down the street. They don't live twenty feet away from their neighbors. NYC has 25% of all of the United State's cases, despite having ~2% of the US's population. This is the same story that is playing out in every state. Let's take Indiana as an example, being that they're having a relatively moderate outbreak with mostly rural areas surrounding a top 15 US city by population: Indianapolis has 41% of the state's cases, despite representing ~12% of the state's population. This shouldn't be a surprise; diseases spread faster in cities. But, what you're asserting is that, eventually, rural areas will see the same spread that cities are. This feels misguided. That isn't to say that some, or even most, rural hospitals wont be "running hot" for a really long time, and that the virus wont spread and these areas, but its simply unlikely that the situation will ever be as bad as in major cities.
  - danharaj 7y ago
    My position is based on the unpredictability of exponential phenomena and the fact that the healthcare system in rural areas has been in the process of being hollowed out for quite some time. The incubation period of COVID-19 (estimated median 6 days last I checked?), coupled with the fact that most people who carry it are asymptomatic means that it's only a matter of time before it hits rural areas whose capacity is like, what? 0.5 ICU beds per county? If you need a ventilator out there you're gonna fucking die.
    - nradov 7y ago
      The majority of COVID-19 patients who need a ventilator are going to die regardless of whether they actually get a ventilator or not. Hopefully that will change as more effective treatments are developed, but that's the current reality. By all means let's do whatever it takes to deploy more ventilators, but they're not a panacea.
anoonmoose 7y ago
Alright well when urban Americans start talking about breaking up the country over this I don't want to hear any kvetching from the rural areas.
- bhupy 7y ago
  I have a feeling rural folk will be a-ok with that.
  - afpx 7y ago
    Until the subsidy checks run out.
    - fourmyle 7y ago
      My money is on the group that controls the food supply.
      - beefalo 7y ago
        The people that own the food supply live far away from where it is produced.
        fourmyle 7y ago
        Agree, I am saying rural America controls the food supply and is armed.
spyspy 7y ago
Anyone looking at this as just a New York or LA or Miami problem will learn soon enough. The cities were hit first for obvious reasons but it viruses don't self-isolate to population centers.
redisman 7y ago
I hope that's true because the country needs food. I don't think rural communities without any protections will be any better off though. Rural communities still gather in stores, bars, restaurants so I don't see why the spread would be any less impactful.
- wolco 7y ago
  Because they interact less and interact less with world travellers, have less world class workers imported from around the globe. They are spread out more, take public transit less. Doesn't mean it won't spread but in a rural setting you see thousands of people less per day on average.
dx87 7y ago
Honestly, my life in the suburbs hasn't been much different since this all started. It's basically been business as usual, except for things like stores not having as much food variety, fast food places being drive through only, and big box stores being less crowded. I think people in the cities will be most effected because of the large number of small shops and independent restaurants that had to close, but out in the suburbs the impact hasn't been any worse than when we get a big snow fall.
- matwood 7y ago
  I've been thinking about this and how talking about the US as a homogenous entity is a mistake. The R0 of a big city is going to be higher than in a smaller city, suburb or the country side. For example, even before the shutdowns I could go to the grocery and count on one hand the number of people I might be within 6' of. Now it's even less. In a place like NYC, that seems impossible. I and all the people I know are taking all the precautions, but density has to play into how fast something can spread.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    And yet there have been very dense, urbanized countries that have gotten a handle on it well (such as Singapore and Hong Kong). We could do it here, but we don't have enough testing or enough masks. The density of the country is not the main driving factor behind which countries are getting hardest hit and which are not.
  - bjtitus 7y ago
    On the other hand, many rural communities are vastly less capable of providing the care for even a small fraction of the big cities. Many rural counties in Colorado and Idaho have the highest rate of death and are most overwhelmed in their states because they have far less capacity.
    - wolco 7y ago
      Less likely to get it vs less likely to get medical treatment. Logically it make sense to want more rural. If you test positive go to the nearest big city for treatment.
gnulinux 7y ago
Americans are not taking this shutdown at the moment, anyway. I live in Boston, other than that people who can work from home, work from home and restaurants/bars are close, absolutely nothing seems to have changed. My roommate works in a random thrift shop, they're classified as "essential business" so he still shows up to work every day to read book.
- mark-r 7y ago
  I don't know why a thrift shop would be classified as "essential". Here in Minnesota they are not.
notyourday 7y ago
Blue collar Americans in the cities are within a couple of weeks to telling everyone to shove it. These are people who had less than a $1000 dollars extra in their bank accounts. They have been out of a job for one paycheck already. Credit card companies are slashing credit lines. Postal service is failing to deliver mail in some locations. Unemployment numbers/systems work as well as Healthcare.gov did upon launch. We are one to two weeks away from massive civil unrest when thousands of people have no money to pay for food.
- vkou 7y ago
  If you don't want this unrest, start giving people food. The solution is obvious, and is only unpalatable to idealogues.
  - notyourday 7y ago
    There's no centralized system to do this. Everything relies on thousands of little trading businesses. Those businesses are now closed. It will take at best a couple of months to get a different system in place. If that system gets rolled out, the US as the country is over because it is an admission that the US is not capable of maintaining it's existing economic system.
    - vkou 7y ago
      All the groceries are currently open. All the farms are currently working, minus migrant labourers, because we would rather have crops rot in the field, than let them into the country. All the truckers are currently hauling. The only part of the distribution system that isn't working very well because of the shutdown is the part that distributes dollars. Any service disruptions right now are not due to the shutdown - they are due to the actual effects of the virus. Look at the MTA. Half of its employees are sick, and the other half have called in sick. Train service has been reduced, and passengers are now packed like sardines in a can on the trains that are still running. Look at the supply chain disruptions - they aren't caused by people being stopped from coming in to work - they are because people can't, or are afraid to come into work. As well they should be, given the state of healthcare in this country. Who is going to pay for their care if they are one of the 20% that need hospitalization after catching it?
CydeWeys 7y ago
This is flat-out not true. People in rural areas still congregate with other people enough to cause bad epidemiological outbreaks. Past pandemics have not only hit the city and spared the countryside.
- fourmyle 7y ago
  I grew up rural bet you didn’t.
  - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
    I suspect rural folks are more likely to go to church, but I could be wrong.
    - fourmyle 7y ago
      Stereotype much?
ogre_codes 7y ago
That's true up until someone brings it to their church, a funeral, school graduation and the entire community gets it and it's like a small bomb going off. Truck drivers still go through small towns, packages still come in and out, they get food.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago

Shouldn't this be asterisked with a "So far"? The black plague devastated rural communities along with urban.

ogre_codes 7y ago
The Black Plague was spread by rodents. Coronavirus currently required a human carrier. I do agree about the "So Far" bit though, if precautions aren't taken, eventually someone will catch it and it'll spread. It's already happened in a few places. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/us/coronavirus-funeral-albany-georgia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/us/coronavirus-funeral-al...
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Those will also be the locations with less preparedness. How many small towns even have ICUs?

danharaj 7y ago

This is misguided. The capacity of the healthcare system in rural areas will be even easier to overwhelm.

gnulinux 7y ago
Of course it's misguided. Which country handled this crisis worse than US? Misguided is an understatement.
- danharaj 7y ago
  If I use the words that I think are appropriate for the obstinate middlebrow skepticism of HN in the face of an uncontrolled pandemic, I get flagged :^)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dylz 7y ago
  Maybe Brazil? > "We're all going to die one day"[0] > “I’m sorry, some people will die, they will die, that’s life,” Bolsonaro said in a television interview on Friday night. “You can’t stop a car factory because of traffic deaths.”[1] > Bolsonaro has compared the new coronavirus to a "little flu," condemned the reaction to it as "hysteria," and said Brazilians' immune systems are so strong they can swim in raw sewage and "don't catch a thing."[2] > He has called the virus a “measly cold.” “Some will die” from it, he said, because “such is life.” [3] > ..more than 20 members of Bolsonaro’s U.S. delegation have tested positive for the coronavirus. Bolsonaro ignored his own health ministry’s advice to self-isolate for a couple of weeks and to discourage large gatherings. He made a defiant show of shaking hands and taking selfies at a rally that attracted hundreds of his supporters. [4] [0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/brazils-bolsonaro-downplays-coronavirus-risks-were-all-going-to-die-one-day-2020-03-29 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/brazils-bolsonaro-downplay... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/27/world/americas/27reuters-health-coronavirus-brazil.html https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/27/world/americas/27... [2] https://www.afp.com/en/news/15/bolsonaro-takes-down-virus-shortage-video-after-uproar-doc-1qb8pu2 https://www.afp.com/en/news/15/bolsonaro-takes-down-virus-sh... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/world/americas/brazil-bolsonaro-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/world/americas/brazil-bol... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/bolsonaro-coronavirus-denial-brazil-trump/608926/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/bolsona...
- fourmyle 7y ago
  Our death rate per capita is substantially lower than China and Italy for example.
Analemma_ 7y ago
New York has 1,600 ICU beds; there are a bunch of counties in rural America that have zero. The CFR in these counties if the virus gets out of hand will be appalling.
013a 7y ago
I think, actually, this statement is misguided, for a couple reasons. Its very likely that people are underestimating the average city's "hospital beds per capita" metric; frankly, a ton of people live in the average city (duh). Are there enough beds in many of America's tier-2 (say, Austin) and tier-3 (say, Cleveland) cities to cover all of the population? By comparison, outside of cities, the spread will be far, far slower than within. Yes, healthcare is worse, but there's an order of magnitude fewer cases. People travel less. They go to the store once every two weeks, not every 4 days, even when there isn't a quarantine. They don't visit the new hipster restaurant down the street. They don't live twenty feet away from their neighbors. NYC has 25% of all of the United State's cases, despite having ~2% of the US's population. This is the same story that is playing out in every state. Let's take Indiana as an example, being that they're having a relatively moderate outbreak with mostly rural areas surrounding a top 15 US city by population: Indianapolis has 41% of the state's cases, despite representing ~12% of the state's population. This shouldn't be a surprise; diseases spread faster in cities. But, what you're asserting is that, eventually, rural areas will see the same spread that cities are. This feels misguided. That isn't to say that some, or even most, rural hospitals wont be "running hot" for a really long time, and that the virus wont spread and these areas, but its simply unlikely that the situation will ever be as bad as in major cities.
- danharaj 7y ago
  My position is based on the unpredictability of exponential phenomena and the fact that the healthcare system in rural areas has been in the process of being hollowed out for quite some time. The incubation period of COVID-19 (estimated median 6 days last I checked?), coupled with the fact that most people who carry it are asymptomatic means that it's only a matter of time before it hits rural areas whose capacity is like, what? 0.5 ICU beds per county? If you need a ventilator out there you're gonna fucking die.
  - nradov 7y ago
    The majority of COVID-19 patients who need a ventilator are going to die regardless of whether they actually get a ventilator or not. Hopefully that will change as more effective treatments are developed, but that's the current reality. By all means let's do whatever it takes to deploy more ventilators, but they're not a panacea.

anoonmoose 7y ago

Alright well when urban Americans start talking about breaking up the country over this I don't want to hear any kvetching from the rural areas.

bhupy 7y ago
I have a feeling rural folk will be a-ok with that.
- afpx 7y ago
  Until the subsidy checks run out.
  - fourmyle 7y ago
    My money is on the group that controls the food supply.
    - beefalo 7y ago
      The people that own the food supply live far away from where it is produced.
      - fourmyle 7y ago
        Agree, I am saying rural America controls the food supply and is armed.

spyspy 7y ago

Anyone looking at this as just a New York or LA or Miami problem will learn soon enough. The cities were hit first for obvious reasons but it viruses don't self-isolate to population centers.

redisman 7y ago

I hope that's true because the country needs food. I don't think rural communities without any protections will be any better off though. Rural communities still gather in stores, bars, restaurants so I don't see why the spread would be any less impactful.

wolco 7y ago
Because they interact less and interact less with world travellers, have less world class workers imported from around the globe. They are spread out more, take public transit less. Doesn't mean it won't spread but in a rural setting you see thousands of people less per day on average.

dx87 7y ago

Honestly, my life in the suburbs hasn't been much different since this all started. It's basically been business as usual, except for things like stores not having as much food variety, fast food places being drive through only, and big box stores being less crowded. I think people in the cities will be most effected because of the large number of small shops and independent restaurants that had to close, but out in the suburbs the impact hasn't been any worse than when we get a big snow fall.

matwood 7y ago
I've been thinking about this and how talking about the US as a homogenous entity is a mistake. The R0 of a big city is going to be higher than in a smaller city, suburb or the country side. For example, even before the shutdowns I could go to the grocery and count on one hand the number of people I might be within 6' of. Now it's even less. In a place like NYC, that seems impossible. I and all the people I know are taking all the precautions, but density has to play into how fast something can spread.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  And yet there have been very dense, urbanized countries that have gotten a handle on it well (such as Singapore and Hong Kong). We could do it here, but we don't have enough testing or enough masks. The density of the country is not the main driving factor behind which countries are getting hardest hit and which are not.
- bjtitus 7y ago
  On the other hand, many rural communities are vastly less capable of providing the care for even a small fraction of the big cities. Many rural counties in Colorado and Idaho have the highest rate of death and are most overwhelmed in their states because they have far less capacity.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Less likely to get it vs less likely to get medical treatment. Logically it make sense to want more rural. If you test positive go to the nearest big city for treatment.

gnulinux 7y ago

Americans are not taking this shutdown at the moment, anyway. I live in Boston, other than that people who can work from home, work from home and restaurants/bars are close, absolutely nothing seems to have changed. My roommate works in a random thrift shop, they're classified as "essential business" so he still shows up to work every day to read book.

mark-r 7y ago
I don't know why a thrift shop would be classified as "essential". Here in Minnesota they are not.

notyourday 7y ago

Blue collar Americans in the cities are within a couple of weeks to telling everyone to shove it. These are people who had less than a $1000 dollars extra in their bank accounts. They have been out of a job for one paycheck already. Credit card companies are slashing credit lines. Postal service is failing to deliver mail in some locations. Unemployment numbers/systems work as well as Healthcare.gov did upon launch. We are one to two weeks away from massive civil unrest when thousands of people have no money to pay for food.

vkou 7y ago
If you don't want this unrest, start giving people food. The solution is obvious, and is only unpalatable to idealogues.
- notyourday 7y ago
  There's no centralized system to do this. Everything relies on thousands of little trading businesses. Those businesses are now closed. It will take at best a couple of months to get a different system in place. If that system gets rolled out, the US as the country is over because it is an admission that the US is not capable of maintaining it's existing economic system.
  - vkou 7y ago
    All the groceries are currently open. All the farms are currently working, minus migrant labourers, because we would rather have crops rot in the field, than let them into the country. All the truckers are currently hauling. The only part of the distribution system that isn't working very well because of the shutdown is the part that distributes dollars. Any service disruptions right now are not due to the shutdown - they are due to the actual effects of the virus. Look at the MTA. Half of its employees are sick, and the other half have called in sick. Train service has been reduced, and passengers are now packed like sardines in a can on the trains that are still running. Look at the supply chain disruptions - they aren't caused by people being stopped from coming in to work - they are because people can't, or are afraid to come into work. As well they should be, given the state of healthcare in this country. Who is going to pay for their care if they are one of the 20% that need hospitalization after catching it?

CydeWeys 7y ago

This is flat-out not true. People in rural areas still congregate with other people enough to cause bad epidemiological outbreaks. Past pandemics have not only hit the city and spared the countryside.

fourmyle 7y ago
I grew up rural bet you didn’t.
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago
  I suspect rural folks are more likely to go to church, but I could be wrong.
  - fourmyle 7y ago
    Stereotype much?

ogre_codes 7y ago

That's true up until someone brings it to their church, a funeral, school graduation and the entire community gets it and it's like a small bomb going off. Truck drivers still go through small towns, packages still come in and out, they get food.