OHIO, USA — Big cities are having big problems with the coronavirus, but small towns and rural areas are facing challenging times as well.
While you may think country air and wide-open spaces would make it easier for social distancing, the fact that there are fewer people also means fewer stores and fewer medical services. That means there's social distancing but only up until it's time to stock up or call the doctor.
The village of Millersburg, Ohio, the Holmes County seat, is about 65 miles south of Cleveland. There the local health department has been keeping a close eye on the rapid, worldwide spread of the virus since January - and preparing.
"We've been putting plans in place so we can make sure that the public is as safe as possible," says Michael Derr, the Commissioner of the Holmes County General Health District. "We actually had an emergency preparedness drill back in January in preparation of this looking for where we could identify some of our gaps and things that we needed to work on."
Typically the size of government in rural areas is scaled down to be proportional to the population, but that the services provided are not. That means fewer people to orchestrate response and relief.
"We definitely face a workforce issue," says Derr. "We don't have the ability to have multiple layers of backup roles. We've taken strategies here early on to separate our workforce and practice what we preach."
Holmes County is home to the largest Amish population in the world, It's a tight knit community that doesn't access television or radio, so getting word out to everyone is a challenge. Notifications and information about the virus have been sent by mail or posted around town.
"We're a very strong faith based community so a lot of folks are congregating together in homes for churches in our Amish community," Derr noted. Education is an important part of the county's mitigation strategy.
The financial hit on Holmes County has been hard. Every year 4-million visitors stop by or pass through to take in antique stores, buffet restaurants and beautiful views, making it Ohio's second largest tourist destination. Only Sandusky's Cedar Point is a bigger draw.
Derr finished with this, "My team is great. They've been doing a great job with this and we have three standing objectives that we work through each day during our operations period. The first one is always be kind to someone today. The second thing is to check in on each other. And the third thing is to do something good for yourself. Because even in this time of stress and sorrow, we're still human and we need to treat each other like you're human. We're all in this together, Ohio."