The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
CT’s rural areas relatively untouched by virus
Kent has one grocery store. One doctor’s office. A handful of restaurants on the small strip in the town’s center. A book shop, a few art galleries and a liquor store. As of Thursday, the town of roughly 3,000 residents had just seven confirmed coronavirus cases.
Kent is among many small, sparsely populated towns in the state — mostly, though not solely, confined to its northwest corner and eastern reaches — that has seen only a small number of coronavirus cases, even as Connecticut’s cities have been hit hard by the pandemic.
Recent data released by the state shows the infection rates per 10,000 residents in every Connecticut municipality, offering a comparative view of the parts of the regions most — and least — affected.
Three towns, Canaan in northern Litchfield County, and Hampton and Scotland in eastern Connecticut — all of which have populations below 2,000 — still have yet to see a confirmed case. Many of their neighbors in rural Litchfield County and much of the eastern part of the state have been slightly affected
by the virus, even as cases have reached into the thousands, or tens of thousands, in Hartford, New Haven and Fairfield counties.
The question for these smaller communities remains: Will the virus continue to work its way to them, or have they avoided the initial wave?
“I am still extremely, extremely cautious,” Kent First Selectman Jean Speck said. “And I know that our residents are still extremely, extremely cautious.”
According to experts, by nature of their geographic locations and certain characteristics, smaller towns, especially those farther away from New York City, may inherently have a reduced risk of experiencing a large uptick in the virus.
Dr. Michael Parry, chief of infectious disease at Stamford Health, said he doubted whether those small, more rural parts of the state would see any significant outbreak.
“In part, they have a smaller population, but also that population is widely spread over the same area of land as a much denser population in southwestern Connecticut, which would be more susceptible, because they’re more densely packed,” Parry said. “Therefore, transmission becomes much easier in a tightly packed community than it does in a rural, spread-out community, because they’re doing social distancing just by virtue of how far apart they live.”
Kent, for instance, has an infection rate per 10,000 residents of 251, comparable with other Litchfield County towns like Warren, Cornwall, Goshen and Salisbury.
Canaan, like much of Litchfield County, has a summer population largely comprised of New Yorkers who escape the city for the county’s pastoral landscape. According to First Selectman Henry Todd, they came early this year, fleeing what was the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak. While Todd said there was some anxiety among year-round residents that their seasonal neighbors might bring the virus with them, they were mostly welcomed. And so far, they seem to have relocated without transmitting COVID-19, at least in any great amount.
“I’m sure there are people in this town that have had a minor case of COVID-19 and have been asymptomatic, or it’s been very mild,” Todd said. “Or they probably haven’t been tested (the nearest hospital is in Sharon, a roughly 20-minute drive
from the western part of town). But we have been able to avoid severe illness, especially, in our elderly population.”
Todd said the town’s relative success so far doesn’t mean they won’t
have a couple cases pop up. But Todd said he believed that, like the state, Canaan is on the downslope.
Until recently, Colebrook, located in northern Litchfield County on
Massachusetts line, was among the small group of municipalities with zero confirmed cases. As of Thursday, there were two. The town’s First Selectman Thomas McKeon, like Parry, attributed that low rate of transmission to the relative confinement of the town’s residents.
“A lot of people who live here do so because they want to be isolated,” McKeon said. “People are being respectful. If one person goes into the post office, the next one waits in their car until they can go.”
In Kent, Speck also attributed the success of smaller towns to the camaraderie of their residents. While places like Kent may lack the robust social services of larger communities, Speck said they have a population eager to help their neighbors.
A community emergency response team was assembled in town, and compiled a list of vulnerable residents on whom they check regularly, Speck said. A group of volunteers has also formed to sew and distribute roughly 200 masks. And the town’s one grocery store, Davis IGA, began a delivery service, specifically for older residents, who may not be able to leave their homes.
“That’s sort of the beauty of a small town is we can be really flexible and dynamic to make sure we’re serving everybody we need to serve,” Speck said. “Day-to-day, week-to-week we can make changes and tweaks to protocols in this pandemic. Whereas, for a larger city or town, it might be harder to make those sort of on-the-fly changes.”
But these smaller towns are not necessarily in the clear. They come with their own set of challenges.
Dr. Nathan Grubaugh, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, is part of a team of researchers using virus genomics to track the spread of the coronavirus in Connecticut. The group learned that early genomes found in Connecticut appeared to match those from the state of Washington, showing the virus’ crosscountry migration. But the majority of cases tracked in Connecticut have had links to New York City.
“I can say that most of the cases now that we’re sequencing in Connecticut have a direct connection to New York City,” Grubaugh said. “Not that patients traveled to New York City, but that the outbreak there is spilling over and now is spreading throughout the state.”
But Grubaugh said that the map of cases per 10,000 residents could be misleading. While it is expected that higher rates of disease will be found in urban areas based on density and ease of transmission, those numbers could be artificially higher than in more rural areas where testing might be scarce or unavailable.
“It could reflect a lack of access, either to outpatient testing or to hospitals with large enough capacity,” Grubaugh said. “In some of the more rural areas, it’s much harder for people to get access to those things. They may be more willing to ride it out, because they might have to drive far to get to a clinic.”
That distance from more rural parts of the state to health care facilities could be problematic in the event someone needs treatment. Speck said Kent sits almost directly between Sharon Hospital, to the north, and New Milford Hospital, to the south. Depending where in the town a resident lives, either hospital could be a drive of more than 20 minutes.
Though it’s widely believed that Connecticut is on the downslope of the initial COVID-19 wave — Grubaugh said testing data is still insufficient to confidently assert that trend, but it’s not certain that smaller towns have avoided the disease.
“Those areas may not get hit as hard, but it’s not like the state uniformly now has virus outbreaks. They start at different times,” Grubaugh said. “So some of these more rural areas may have their peaks much, much later, just because it takes longer to get there and get established.”