COVID-19 has quickly caught up in non-metropolitan areas and is now causing more deaths in those locations than in the large cities hit hardest early on.
When the coronavirus outbreak hit the U.S. in March, it was major cities like New York and Seattle that saw alarming rates of cases and deaths. But as the nation moves into a so-called third-wave of the pandemic, rural Americans are now the ones being disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Analyzing the average death rate in non-metropolitan areas over the last 14 days, those living in rural areas are shown to be dying at a rate that is nearly 2.5 times higher than those living in metropolitan areas. Data from the Centers for Diseases and Control Prevention indicates that the death rate in metropolitan areas is 0.23, compared with the 0.55 rate in non-metropolitan areas. The impact on those living in rural areas versus urban areas seems to have swapped over the course of the pandemic. In the first two weeks of the pandemic, between March 19 and April 2, Americans in metropolitan areas were eight times more likely to die from COVID-19 compared to their rural counterparts. However, as the nation faced a second wave over the summer, death rates in urban cities and rural towns began to even out. In the first week of August, death rates among Americans living in metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas was roughly the same. By August 9, the death rate of rural Americans had surpassed that of Americans living in urban areas—and the gap between the two has only continued to widen. Americans who had previously been eight times less likely to die from COVID-19 are now nearly 2.5 times more likely to. As cases began to rise over the summer in these locations, the CDC stated that the 46 million Americans in rural areas faced distinctive challenges due to these individuals’ greater likelihood of being in the high-risk category and having relatively less access to health care. “Worries about the consequences of COVID-19 outbreaks in rural areas of the US go back to the beginning of the pandemic,” Charles DiMaggio, an injury epidemiologist at New York University, told Newsweek. “The rates of people with conditions that put them at risk of severe disease, things like high blood pressure and obesity, are higher than in urban areas.
