Rural America beset with chronic poverty struggles to deal with Covid-19

To some extent, resistance to wearing masks and social-distancing has played a role in these outbreaks

In late October, Kelly Chandler sat 10 feet from me, masked, at a conference-room table in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. For the past nine months she’d had the unenviable task of preparing the surrounding county for Covid-19. Three hours from the Twin Cities, the area had largely avoided the early surge of the virus. But last month, the case numbers started ticking upward alarmingly. “I feel like we’re going to teeter until the end of this year,” she told me.

On Nov. 9, Itasca County, population 45,000, announced that it had recorded an additional 205 Covid diagnoses over the previous seven