Covid-19 is running rampant through some workplaces, including factories and farms.

By Lois Parshley @ Vox.com, April 28

[....] “The epicenter of this outbreak really has shifted into the smaller rural areas,” said Angela Hewlett, associate professor in infectious disease at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in a recent Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing. And that’s a major problem, given that the health systems of many of these places are the least equipped to deal with a sudden surge in cases.

Testing in many less-populous areas has lagged even further behind the already-low national average, obscuring the extent of transmission in more sparsely populated areas. As protests in largely rural states show, some people assume rural areas might be spared the worst of Covid-19 outbreaks [....]

Rural can mean many things. The US census definition, for example, is any spot with a population of fewer than 50,000 people. But depending on what federal definition you use, some 17 percent to 49 percent of people in the US live in “rural” areas.

Additionally, otherwise-rural regions can have small and even fairly large metropolitan areas. According to a new Covid-19 map from the Dartmouth Atlas Project, the top 10 regions with the fastest growth rates in cases are primarily metropolitan areas with blue-collar industry, located in largely rural states.

Because they are small, many rural counties have few cases, giving the impression that broad regions of the country are still unaffected. A more accurate picture of what is happening with Covid-19 across the US emerges when the data are aggregated to larger geographic areas defined on where people get health care. “Both counties and states fail to reflect how and where people get care,” explains Elliott Fisher, a professor of health policy and medicine at the Dartmouth Institute [....]