“We don’t have the fear of the virus.' Rural communities where the threat of the pandemic seems like a world away are some of the first places to start reopening in the U.S. after weeks of restrictions.
In California, six rural counties with a combined 500,000 people asked Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday if they could begin a “careful and phased reopening,” even as counties in the San Francisco Bay Area moved to extend their stay-at-home orders through May.
Mike MacLeod, who owns a garden center just south of the resort town of Stowe, said the phone began ringing within minutes of the governor’s announcement Friday loosening the restrictions. Yet a rural ZIP code is no magic shield and carries its own disadvantage: fewer medical resources. That can make outbreaks difficult to contain, such as the infections that swept through an assisted living facility in recent weeks in another small Montana town, Shelby, leading to six deaths.
“That’s what got us to this point, more than the rural nature of our state,” the Democratic governor said Monday.
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