Try to watch Rachel Maddow’s show from earlier this evening. She describes what’s going on in Blackhawk County, Iowa (Waterloo/Cedar Falls), and includes footage from medical professionals there. I’ve spent lots of time there, as three of my mother’s brothers moved there after finishing their military service. It should be a sobering picture for anybody who doesn’t live in one of the major metropolitan areas. MSNBC rebroadcasts it a couple of times overnight, so you should be able to record it and watch it later.
Waterloo is the site of a big pork processing plant where, once one of the workers came down with Covid-19, it rapidly spread among workers at the crowded plant, and then spread into the wider community. According to the excellent website being maintained by the New York Times, three of the metropolitan or micropolitan areas where the average daily growth rate in Covid-19 cases is increasing most rapidly are in Iowa: Sioux City, Waterloo-Cedar Falls, and Des Moines. Two more of these areas are in North Dakota: Fargo and Grand Forks. In the Sioux Falls area, cases are doubling every day. In Waterloo-Cedar Falls, they’re doubling every 3.6 days. NONE of the areas where the growth rate is increasing most rapidly are what anybody would think of as major metropolitan areas.
I recently finished watching a series of lectures from The Great Courses Plus about the Black Death. As someone once said, history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. It’s astounding how similarly Covid-19 is spreading in the U.S. to how the Black Death spread in western Europe during the 14th Century. It first reached major port cities, since people could travel much more rapidly by sea than by land, and since they had existing connections with areas to which it had already spread. (Think of places like NYC as the modern equivalent.) Then it reached places to which people from all over western Europe tended to travel, such as Santiago de Compostela (for pilgrimages). (Think of places like New Orleans at Mardi Gras or the Florida beaches during spring break as the modern equivalents.) But it eventually reached the smaller cities that weren’t major trade centers, and even rural areas. (Think of states, largely in red State America as the modern equivalents, where Governors didn’t impose serious restrictions because they didn’t think they had a problem — whereas they just didn’t have a problem YET.)
The sad thing is that you could see this coming well in advance. As of a couple of weeks ago, there weren’t a lot of cases anywhere in Iowa, but the statistics showed that nearly every county in Iowa had one or more confirmed cases, so it clearly existed and was spreading in the community. Combine that fact with putting people together in large concentrations where it’s impossible to socially isolate, and it becomes almost inevitable that there will be large outbreaks wherever people come together in dense concentrations — and that they will then spread it much more rapidly to their surrounding communities. The only POSSIBLE way to have kept the meat-packing plants open would have been to keep employees there from being exposed to the virus in the larger community, and the only way POSSIBLE to do that would have been to impose strict controls on all “non-essential” social contacts. Even that might no have worked, but it could have likely delayed the virus reaching the meat-packing plants enough to spread out the dates when it reached those plants.