Is this rural community really Texas' sickest county?
It’s impossible to know for sure how the new coronavirus got to rural Donley County, but locals bet it took U.S. Route 287, like everything else.
The highway carries 14,000 cars through on a normal day, about four for each of the 3,387 people living in the perfectly rectangular county near the Oklahoma side of the Texas Panhandle. Drivers stop at the Allsup’s or Cornell’s Country Store as they blaze from Dallas toward Denver or back again.
When known coronavirus cases are mapped for each of Texas’ 254 counties, Donley County looks like a sickly glitch, an outlier: It was reporting nearly 7 cases for every 1,000 people as of Sunday. The state’s next-highest known rate of infection was under 5 per 1,000, also in a Panhandle county; in Dallas, that figure was less than 1 per 1,000.
But the statistical aberration may better reflect Texas’ limited coronavirus testing than Donley County’s poor health.
https://www.ksat.com/news/texas/2020/04/20/is-this-rural-community-really-texas-sickest-county/