Kansas Towns Are Insulated From Coronavirus Now -- But They May Take A Harder Hit Later

[pstokely]

no fake news for them

https://www.kcur.org/post/kansas-towns-are-insulated-coronavirus-now-they-may-take-harder-hit-later#stream/0

"Remote rural towns are a good place to be early in a pandemic, according to epidemiologists, but that flips as the people in those towns begin to get sick.

Fredonia, Kansas, and other rural towns tend to be more spread out, lowering the chances that people are in close enough contact to catch the novel coronavirus.

“I always say it’s a hundred miles from anywhere,” quips Cassie Edson, with the Wilson County Health Department. “It’s a hundred miles from Wichita, a hundred miles to Joplin, a hundred miles to Tulsa.”

By definition, rural areas are removed from major seaports, airports and often even big highways, so it generally takes longer for new viruses to show up, but when they do, that distance can make treatment challenging."

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

The town that blocked the Spanish Flu

Alex Navarro, a medical historian at the University of Michigan, says Spanish Flu swept the entire country in 1918. There were a few notable exceptions, including Gunnison, Colorado.

“You have the story of a town that literally barricaded the roads and forced everyone who did come into town into quarantine,” says Navarro.

In fact, all of Gunnison County sealed itself off from the outside world for four months. It worked. At the height of the pandemic, the county recorded just two cases of the Spanish Flu, both in isolation.

Navarro says people keep asking him if a remote, little town could pull off the same trick today.

“It's a very highly qualified maybe. I mean, I think there's probably no doubt that it can work if it's done properly,” says Navarro. “You have to do it really early. You have to do it as strictly as possible, and it has to last long enough for community transmission outside of that area to end.”

It turned out that even the four-month shutdown in Gunnison wasn’t long enough. More than 100 people got sick, and several died when the city finally lifted its barricades.

[BigmanPigman]

2. I saw a video the other day about how the Spanish Flu even

eventually hit a very small village in Alaska. Most of the population died.