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Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting question. Urban areas, it would seem, are likely to get the spread a lot faster, but they also have way better medical infrastructure. It will spread slower in rural areas, but you have way fewer hospital beds, and less medical infrastructure in general.

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The US's rural healthcare is really bad. I was in a very rural part of Ohio recently and was listening to people talk about how they really only have an urgent care facility nearby but the closest hospital is a decent bit away. Even then they talked about how it wasn't a good hospital and recounted horror stories of friends/family and how they always go to a further/different hospital because they don't get good care at the closer one (which again, is not that close).

I live (urban/suburban) in spitting distance of 3-4+ hospitals (I don't even know for sure) with at least 2 of those being ones I would trust my life to in a heartbeat (the others I just don't know enough about). I was really unaware of the disconnect before that trip and it didn't really occur to me that hospital != hospital. So not only do some rural location have limited or no hospitals but they don't trust the ones they do have.

It also doesn't help that Trump is still keeping up his cult rallies and still has one scheduled next week.

The current White House is essentially the worst case scenario in dealing with this outbreak and is going to get people killed. There is still current exponential growth in the USA, and there is near zero testing going on due to incompetence and coverup. Things are going to get much worse.

Downvote all you want, but these are facts.

I didn't downvote, but the politicization is unhelpful. When Trump pondered travel restrictions to/from China a month ago, the media jumped at him for being racist/isolationist. All the "experts" explained us that open borders are necessary to fight an epidemic.

Which legitimate person would ever say open borders help an epidemic? The virus spreading as it is a direct bad side-effect of globalization such as it is.

The main issue right now is the lack of testing and covering up just to try and bump the stock market, and it obviously is having the opposite effect since the problem is just getting worse the longer the problem is ignored.

The WHO's official guidance in late January was that countries should not restrict travel to fight the coronavirus. Travel restrictions "cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies", they said.

Maybe we should ring up Italy?

In the latter case, property prices might drop as children inherit properties of departed elderly.

Property values will fall after the next recession. It looks very likely that this set off what will become the next recession. (I mean, a recession is two quarters, so it hasn't happened yet... but it seems really unlikely to me that we won't see a recession, considering.)

People can be transported from rural areas to urban hospitals..

The next question is, will they. I know of a town in Indiana where a surprising number of people don't get medical help. Some of it is money, but a big part is cultural. Indianapolis scares them. I dare say, for too many Indianapolis is scarier than COVID-19.

Depends on the disease.

Something like a stroke requires immediate action (say, within 2 hours) to be able to use the best treatments available. Living very far away from a good hospital makes your survival chances quite lower.

For Covid-19, as far as I read, some people have gone to the hospital (already having trouble to breath) and died after a few hours. But those seem extreme cases. Normally you would have a couple days to go to the hospital from the moment you realize something is odd.

Life flights put most rural places in the US within those time bounds.

Yes, but those bounds are not binary. The faster you arrive, the higher the chance survival (specially for things like strokes, arriving in 30 minutes is way better than in 2 hours).

Then there is the issue of cost for that flight and the poor state of healthcare.

The quality of medical infrastructure is going to play a small role in outcomes when the entire system is overwhelmed many times over in the next month or so.

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