The first wave of COVID-19 mostly spared rural America affecting city dwellers with significantly greater frequency. The most recent increase, on the other hand, was unique. COVID cases in nonmetropolitan areas exceeded those in metropolitan areas. Overall, COVID mortality rates also increased.
The increasing cases and fatalities across the USA due to the spread of corona infection have shocked the world. The experts from medical have conducted various studies with the help of which they can figure out the causes for the same and solve it.
Rural COVID Patients In ICUs Die More Frequently Than Urban Individuals
As per one of the studies, it is seen that there are a huge disparity between medical facilities, treatments and health conditions among people from rural areas than those who live in urban areas. This difference has been the prime reason for the increasing number of deaths.
Rural COVID patients who end up in an intensive care unit have a higher risk of dying than their urban counterparts, according to new research led by Sunil Sharma, the chief of critical care and sleep medicine section.
“This is the first study coming out of Appalachia,” said Sharma, a professor in the School of Medicine. “We were surprised that nobody had made that effort to look at what our community needs are.
And if you don’t work in a hospital, I think sometimes there’s this sense of comfort in thinking, ‘Maybe things are not as bad in rural areas,’ but they are. They’re worse than in urban areas.”
The researchers looked at 81 patients who were transferred from rural and critical access hospitals to a larger hospital’s ICU for more specialized treatment. This distinction is given to hospitals that have less than 25 acute care beds and an average duration of stay of fewer than four days.
There are increasing indicators that the COVID19 virus has begun to spread to rural areas, posing a threat to an already overburdened and underfunded rural health care system.
We computed and analyzed the county-level change in COVID19 prevalence rates by rural-urban status over three weeks to aid in the legislative decision process and effective resource channeling. In addition, based on predicted occurrence rates, we identified hotspots.
Sharma’s findings also show that if rural COVID patients are intubated, their risk of death increases if they are over 70 years old or have been intubated for more than five days.
“It’s quite difficult because the patients’ families are clutching for any type of information and flailing in the absence of it,” he explained. “With this kind of detailed knowledge, individuals can make informed decisions for their loved ones and feel at ease.”
“We realized that because of this crunch in resources, these critical access hospitals were taking the burden of these patients, which they were ill-equipped to do,” he said. “This wasn’t the fault of the hospitals.
They just were not designed to handle this kind of pandemic. You’re talking about the worst type of respiratory failure that you encounter. These are things that we see in tertiary care hospitals, but these critical access hospitals don’t see that. For them, it was very overwhelming to manage those patients.”
The fact that rural COVID patients have lower mortality rates than urban COVID patients underscores why it’s critical for people who reside in rural areas to acquire the COVID vaccine, according to Sharma.
“We’re not talking about New York City or Atlanta, Georgia,” he said. “This is us—West Virginia. So, get vaccinated because this is terrible news. Our mortality is much higher than in other areas.
If you’re vaccinated, and you do get COVID, then, yes, you might have some bad days—you might feel like you have the bad flu—but you’re going to live.”
