‘It’s gone haywire’: When COVID arrived in rural America

DAWSON, Ga. (AP) – As the world’s attention was fixated on the horrors in Italy and New York City, the per capita death rates in counties in the southwest corner of Georgia quietly climbed to among the worst in the nation.

A couple of 30 years died days apart.

The cemetery on the edge of town staggered graveside services, one an hour. The county ordered an emergency morgue.

The devastation is a cautionary tale of what happens when the virus seeps into communities on the losing end of the nation’s most intractable inequalities: these counties are rural, mostly African American and poor.