It's a plausible idea. I already life in a relatively "safe" place, and yet I find myself considering moving to an even "safer" shack in the remote woods somewhere. Feels like a storm is coming...
If things get really bad, humanitarian aid may or may not come for the cities, but it’s definitely not coming for a cabin in the woods. Are you prepared to live off the land?
In a disaster affecting a large area (including adversely impacting aid from outside one's area), rural people will have to be more self-sufficient than city people, but they're also in a better position to be.
Rural strategic advantages I imagine include: lower cost of living, ability to own rather than rent (lower risk of homelessness?), land to grow food and have animals, space to store and build necessities, space for disease distancing, trade with nearby farmers when city supply chains disrupted, more likely culture of neighbors knowing each other and looking out for each other.
Some of my "college town" city-slicker disaster strategy (focused on economic, natural disasters like hurricanes, industrial accidents, and bad actors) didn't quite play out with Covid-19:
* Despite our money, we couldn't insulate sufficiently from catastrophically bad action by national leadership.
* One of our own big-money biotechs who should've known better actually created the initial superspreader event in Boston.
* The wildcard fact that we're nationally strategic (economic, prestige, and military tech) and also have students of much of the world's most wealthy and powerful here, didn't matter for external aid in this scenario. (Our governor even had to engage in cloak&dagger, to keep medical worker PPE we'd bought from being seized by national.) (And, though having the children of the wealthy&powerful here might be an asset for getting aid in local/regional disasters -- acknowledging the other side of how awful some disaster-hit poor areas of the US have been treated in pre-Covid recent memory -- that mattered less when "outside" was also struggling and had no aid to give, and maybe wouldn't have mattered as much anyway, after the universities sent students home.)
And problems that were predictable, if one had been thinking of pandemic as a likely near-term scenario:
* We're densely-packed, mostly in old apartments with quirks and problems, often with roommates, and relatively little open space.
* The substantial number of self-absorbed people accustomed to getting what they want doesn't help. For example, the several joggers who huffed&puffed past me on my own street's narrow sidewalk in the space of 10 minutes last week, only one even bothered to pull up a cloth mask as they passed. And generally only ~50% mask use rate among non-joggers on that same street last week, on a straight shot line between Harvard and MIT.
What so far has played out here better than it might've, I suspect is due to Cambridge and the Boston area having a lot of smart officials who care about doing their jobs well, a wealth of medical personnel and resources, a relatively progressive culture by US standards that resulted in a lot of attention being focused on helping the less fortunate here, the fact that the universities and colleges eventually told the students not to come back after spring break debauchery-acclerated pandemic spreading, overall passable public effort at distancing&masks, and a good amount of money to make that all easier.
(That's not to say that there aren't already countless family tragedies locally due to Covid, nor that unfathomable human misery around the world hasn't been caused -- only that the local situation could've been even worse already, if we didn't have some things in our favor.)
It's not the joggers we need to worry about, it's the elderly/infirm (average age of the dead is 81) and long term care home inhabitants (63% of deaths) [0].
[0] https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-june-13-2020/dow... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
Furthermore, I think most of the storm is not really medical. I'm feeling something more like the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" coming. Hard to know how to handle that, but perhaps best to seem like a peasant with few opinions.
And for gods' sake, stay the hell off of social media.
Who was hurt? Did I miss a headline?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/17/facebook-shuts-down-g...