In these 12 Tennessee counties, the coronavirus outbreak is as bad as ever – The Tennessean
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COVID-19 cases surging in rural Tennessee counties
During a visit to Tennessee, Dr. Deborah Birx said the virus was reaching into rural counties and rates would rise if local leaders did not step in.
HOUSTON COUNTY, Tenn. – At times, it is as if Bonnie Dunavant is surrounded by coronavirus.
From her blue-and-pink brick flower shop in the quaint town of Erin, Dunavant once felt safely isolated from a distant, intangible threat. But the virus infiltrated Erin about month ago, and now one in five tests conducted here is positive.
Dunavant’s 93-year-old sister caught the virus. Her son caught the virus. Her daughter-in-law caught the virus. She provides flower arrangements to a funeral home across the street where local families mourn virus victims and the undertaker doesn’t always wear a mask. And at a nursing home nearby – the only nursing home in the county – at least 13 people died from the virus in less than a month.
“It makes you realize that it is real,” Dunavant said. “We were lucky for a while, and then it hit us.”
Erin, a retirement community of about 1,400, known for greenery and Irish roots, is the largest town in Tennessee’s Houston County, which now has one of the highest coronavirus test positivity rates in the state. While much of Tennessee celebrated a slowed outbreak throughout September, infections spiked in rural counties like this one. Houston County’s average positivity rates exceeded 22% as of last week.
Some Houston County residents say they once viewed the virus as limited to cities like Nashville and Memphis but now face the reality that small towns are not immune. Coronavirus may have been slow to come to Erin, but it arrived all the same.
“It just finally reached our borders,” said Houston County Mayor James Bridges, who caught the virus in August. “After going through the larger metropolitan areas, and then the secondary cities like Dickson and Clarksville, it’s finally reached the rural areas.”
Rural counties, high positivity rates
The coronavirus outbreak has reduced to a stubborn simmer across most of Tennessee, neither growing nor shrinking, while still killing about two dozen people a day.
Big cities largely flattened the outbreak with masks and social distancing. The virus has spread across the entire state, but it hasn’t yet exploded in most rural areas as some experts feared it would.
But there are hot spots. Twelve counties reported seven-day positivity rates between 15% and 30% in late-September – Clay, Fentress, Grundy, Houston, Jackson, Johnson, Lake, Lawrence, Pickett, Putnam, Smith and Stewart – according to state virus data. In a majority of these counties, infections recently reached levels never seen before.
Most of these counties are sparsely populated, so their outbreaks remain proportionately small and their positivity rates can rise and fall rapidly. Regardless, an average rate above 15% suggest the virus permeated places it had not previously reached, spreading to residents previously shielded by rural life and empty spaces.
For comparison purposes, the positivity rate in Nashville peaked in mid-July at 18.5% and since dropped below 4%, according to city officials. The White House considers any area with a positivity rate above 10% to be a coronavirus “red zone.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, a White House coronavirus official, predicted this scenario during a visit to Tennessee in late June. At the time, Birx said the virus was reaching into rural areas and positivity rates would rise if leaders did not slow the spread.
“I came here to talk to the governor about how it important is for every rural Tennessean to wear a mask,” Birx said on July 27. “It is in all of your rural counties.”
No mask mandates in troubled counties
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee repeatedly declined to mandate masks statewide but but extend to county mayors the authority to do so themselves. Many populous counties quickly enacted mandates to curb the virus, but most rural counties did not.
In the 12 troubled counties spotlighted in this story, no mask mandates exist today.
Lake and Johnson counties enacted mandates as infections spiked in mid-August, but both mandates are now over. Lake County’s mandate expired less than three weeks after it began. Johnson County downgraded its mandate to a recommendation on Wednesday even though the county positivity rate remained above 18% on that date.
Houston County – where coronavirus swept over the town of Erin – has never had a mask mandate and is unlikely to enact one. Bridges, the county mayor, said he is aware of the county’s alarming positivity rate but doesn’t’ believe a mandate is needed.
Most residents wear masks and some local businesses require them even without a mandate, Bridges said.
“In general, people are smart,” he said. “And they know what they need to do to take care of themselves and their loved ones and their community. We’ve left it up to them to do the right thing, and for the most part they have.”
Not everyone in Erin agrees.
Scott Barnes, a local construction worker, worries daily that someone without a mask will spread the virus to his 8-year-old son, Conner, who may be more at risk because he has cystic fibrosis, a disease that affects his lungs.
Barnes believes the absence of a mask mandate emboldens the local community to take risks, and he sees the lack of a mandate as a small example of the government-wide failure to treat the virus seriousness that it deserve.
For months, the White House signaled the virus was little more than a common cold, Barnes said, and the nonchalance trickled down to local leaders and average Americans. Now, towns like Erin are paying the price.
“One of the biggest, richest countries in the world, and we’ve got the worse cases out of anybody? That’s crazy,” Barnes said.
“It should have been handled way differently. When this thing first started, the government acted like it wasn’t anything. They didn’t take enough precaution to stop it in the beginning. And now here we are.”
Brett Kelman is the health care reporter for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 615-259-8287 or at brett.kelman@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter at @brettkelman.
Alexis Clark can be reached at 931-217-8519 or at aclark@gannett.com. To support her work, sign up for a digital subscription to TheLeafChronicle.com
