Five years on, have people recovered from COVID? | The Excerpt
On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Five years ago this month the COVID-19 virus started ravaging populations, changing life here in America and around the globe. Many shrugged it off initially. It wasn’t until March 9th when the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, declared it a pandemic. In Quinter, Kansas, a small rural town of about 1,000 and in surrounding Gove County, it devastated the population, killing 1 in 132. That made Gove the deadliest county in the U.S. in December of 2020. Five years on, how have residents recovered, or have they? Paste BN National Correspondent Trevor Hughes revisits Quinter and shares the lasting impacts in a place that suffered such huge losses.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, January 5th, 2025. Five years ago this month, the COVID-19 virus started ravaging populations changing life here in America and around the globe. Many shrugged it off initially. It wasn't until March 9th when the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared it a pandemic. In Quinter, Kansas, a small rural town of about 1000, and in surrounding Gove County, it devastated the population killing one in 132 that made Gove the deadliest county in the US in December of 2020 Five years on, how have residents recovered or have they? To hear more about the lasting impacts of coronavirus and a place that suffered such huge losses I'm now joined by USA Today, national correspondent Trevor Hughes. Thanks for joining us on The Excerpt, Trevor.
Trevor Hughes:
Glad to be here.
Dana Taylor:
Trevor, you were in Quinter back in December of 2020. Tell us what this town was like in the throes of this devastating virus. Where were people dying?
Trevor Hughes:
Most of the people who died in Gove County were in a nursing home. I think 17 of the 20-odd deaths that had occurred at that time were in what was known as the long-term care center. It's where the town's elders lived out their final years. This is a very, very rural area. People drive 20 minutes just to get coffee to get to town, and so the county is very large, but Quinter, the town is quite small, and so that long-term care center was really a center of the town itself. A lot of people worked there, many people had their family there, and so when the deaths began in the nursing home, it really took away a huge portion of the town's history. I mean, I remember talking to folks who lost their mothers, their grandfathers, their favorite uncle, the people who made fabulous chocolate cake, or who remembered the town's history.
At the time it was a very interesting dichotomy because you had one group of folks in the town really working hard to try and protect everyone, masks and social distancing and what can we do to stay healthy. Then there was another part of the town that was very much like, well, these things happen and I'm not going to really change the way I do my business, the way I changed my life. And there was very much an attitude of, well, a lot of folks in the nursing home died, and they were pretty old anyway and I was really struck by that.
Dana Taylor:
And how were people coping?
Trevor Hughes:
At the time, this was such a new thing. I think we forget how scared many of us were and people wanted to follow familiar patterns. They wanted to go to church with their neighbors. They wanted to celebrate their God and worship their God together in a way that said, we are a community, that we are cared for and loved. And when social distancing came, and Kansas was not as strict as some places, but folks weren't really supposed to be gathering in large groups, and that took away a lot of the core of what made small communities like this themselves. Folks lost a lot of identity. And then you also had this very vicious fight again between the two sides of the town, the folks who were trying to take what they thought were very reasonable precautions and the folks who essentially said, "We're not doing that."
Dana Taylor:
And fast forward to today five years on, is COVID still a threat in Quinter?
Trevor Hughes:
There's two ways to look at this. COVID as an infection, as a virus is still a threat. People are still getting sick from it. I interviewed a woman who has had it six times and she believes that it has exacerbated her diabetes, that it has made her husband's hearing get worse, caused heart problems for her daughter, but at the same time, she doesn't get vaccinated against it anymore. She got the first round of vaccines but decided it just wasn't worth it at that point. And so there is the physical concern that the virus causes, right? People are getting sick and people are still dying from COVID in this country. But then there is the harm that it caused in splitting apart our communities and transforming how we see each other, how we see our neighbors, how we treat our neighbors and that is very clearly lingering. People are still mad at each other years later.
Dana Taylor:
What have the lasting impacts of COVID been in this part of the country or are there any lasting impacts?
Trevor Hughes:
It's easy to forget how much this changed how we go to school, how we go to work, how we vacation even. And in a place like Gove County where the seasonal patterns have been largely unchanged for 150 years, it was like a bomb going off. People are still not talking to each other. People are still very catty with each other about who did what and who said what and who was on what person's side. It has affected the workforce. It has affected the relationship people have with their local government, which is made up of their neighbors. It has had such a lingering impact because of all these social implications that came on from how we tried to manage the infection and sort of everything that came about from that.
Dana Taylor:
Has the economy in Quinter recovered?
Trevor Hughes:
This is a tough question in the sense that the economy in America has been up and down over the last few years. And in many parts of America, the economy is doing really, really well, especially if you have money invested in the stock market. But Quinter is older, it is poorer, and it is less well-educated. And so as a general rule, their economy has not done as well as some urban areas of America. And at the same time, high gas prices really affect you if you've got to drive 20 minutes every time you leave your house. So what I heard from a lot of folks in Quinter is that the economy is not doing well.
There's a lot of businesses, there are a lot of storefronts that are vacant on their main street, and I heard over and over again, no one wants to work that local businesses are having a hard time getting young people to work, especially for relatively minimum wage jobs at restaurants, and there's only a handful of restaurants in town. There is a sense of a turning away from the sort of agricultural heritage of Gove County and like many rural counties, young people who leave to go to college often don't come back.
Dana Taylor:
In many ways, Quinter is a unique place in America. The people in Quinter don't really watch television, for instance. Where are they getting their information about COVID, if not from television news?
Trevor Hughes:
Well, let's be clear. There's lots of people in Quinter and Gove County who do have television, lots of people who do have the internet at home, but there's about 20% of the population because of religious reasons who do not have television at home, and they don't have the internet at home. And so it was a real challenge for the public health folks that I talked to about how to get those messages to folks. Now, there were notices in the newspapers, but this is also a community where if I tell you I saw a woman who was wearing this, driving this car, people will know exactly who that is.
It's a very, very small town. I mean, honestly, this is the kind of town where people know who's on weight loss drugs because they see each other. They know everybody's business but that was a real challenge, how to get good information to folks. And then the other part was how to get information to folks who weren't necessarily interested in listening to what public health experts had to say. I mean, there were some very, very vicious fights between the public health community in Gove County and the population at large.
Dana Taylor:
As you've reported, the politics of masking was a very contentious issue back in 2020. Is that still true today? How are people dealing with a winter surge in cases?
Trevor Hughes:
Back then, people were very upset about the idea of having to wear a mask in public. And it's interesting now, you don't see anyone wearing masks except for the woman I interviewed who's had COVID for her six times. She was wearing a mask when I talked to her, but she also had the flu at the same time. And so I think people when they are acutely ill are maybe a little more willing to wear a mask, especially if they're working around in public. But in general, it's a pretty rural area. People don't congregate a ton. This idea that the government would tell you you had to wear a mask, that you had to stay five feet away from your neighbors or whatever the rule was, those impacts linger. People are still really mad that someone tried to tell them how to live their lives under these very specific circumstances.
I imagine that the number of people who are getting COVID in Gove County right now is going up as it is all over the country because it is winter and that's what happens just like the seasonal flu, but no one's getting vaccinated. I looked at the statistics the other day out of a county population of about 1700 people, there's like 160 people who are current on their COVID vaccines with the current boosters. I will also note that the hospital, which in many cases requires vaccination, has 160 employees. So people are just not getting vaccinated and getting boosters for COVID anymore.
Dana Taylor:
As of last year, COVID has infected upwards of 700 million and is directly responsible for over seven million deaths globally. More recently, bird flu cases are on the rise, and there have been several worries and outbreaks of measles. Scientists are saying it's not if, but when the next pandemic will hit. Are folks in Quinter ready for it?
Trevor Hughes:
I think that a lot of folks in Quinter don't think it was that bad, right? This is a community that is relatively isolated, and there were proportionally quite a lot of folks who died but again, most of those folks were in a nursing home. Most of those folks were elderly. Many of those folks had pre-existing medical conditions and so it's easy to look at those deaths and say those people were going to die pretty soon anyway. That was certainly an approach or a perspective I heard a number of times when I was first in Quinter. What I have seen in reporting on COVID, not just here in Gove County, is this a real loss of trust by Americans in public health authorities and in government in general. And I do wonder when the next pandemic comes, will we listen to those experts?
And I remember hearing very early on in the COVID pandemic, an infectious disease expert saying something along the lines of, "If we do our jobs well, everyone will say we overreacted. And if we do our jobs poorly, there won't be anyone to second guess us, because too many people will have died." And that really has stuck with me because I do think there are a lot of Americans who think the steps we took were too much. That closing schools, keeping businesses closed, closing churches, that those were so drastic. It's huge steps that it made us something different than the country folks thought they lived in. And I think based on the reporting I've done, that there will be a lot of folks who are not going to listen when the next pandemic comes because they feel like they got through this one okay.
Dana Taylor:
Trevor, it's always good to have you on. Thank you.
Trevor Hughes:
For sure. Good to be here.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks for our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance, our executive producers Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to Podcasts@USAToday.com. Thanks for listening I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson Will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.