WVU in the News: Riding out the first wave of COVID-19 in rural America
Written by Michael Brumage, MD, MPH, FACP, FACPM, Director, Preventive Medicine Residency Program; Medical Officer, Injury Control Research Center:
As the first wave of the coronavirus tsunami crests, communities across Rural America are experiencing the consequences in different ways. Rural southwestern Georgia has been especially hard-hit as they begin to reopen businesses. West Virginia, where I live, has escaped the worst while we remain under a stay at home order from the Governor.
Rural America was at a disadvantage even prior to the pandemic. A 2014 study demonstrated the widening health disparity between rural and urban areas, showing a life expectancy of 79.1 years in large metropolitan areas, 76.9 in small urban towns, and 76.7 in rural areas. The opioid crisis has disproportionately driven down life expectancy in the rural U.S. because of drug-overdose deaths. Other “diseases of despair,” as described by the Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton in 2015, including heart and lung disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and suicides, have been on the rise in the rural heartland as well.