Dr. Marynia Kolak is the assistant director for Health Informatics at the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago, which recently released a U.S. COVID-19 Atlas, providing county-level data on COVID-19 cases to help locate emerging hotspots for the disease. 'A lot of hotspots
These past several weeks, national attention regarding the COVID-19 pandemic has been focused on known urban hotspots such as New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. However, a troubling new trend is emerging: outbreaks in rural communities.
The rise of COVID-19 in rural communities might at first seem counterintuitive. With people spread far apart, sometimes with acres of land between houses, rural communities on the surface appear to be practicing social distancing by default. On top of that, Kolak said some states have been slow to adopt formal social distancing policies, which may drive an uptick in infections among their rural populations.
This helps explain how the disease spread to rural locations. But why are people in rural communities more likely to die of COVID-19 infection, as the data also seems to indicate?
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