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Inside One of America’s Vaccine Deserts
How rural areas could affect our Covid-19 immunity
Along a winding roadway festooned with lanky longleaf pines, a sign welcomes you to Meadville, Mississippi, population 519.
“Oh, we’re bigger than that,” says Cynthia Ann Wilkinson, a Mississippi State Extension agent, to the journalist who mentioned the sign in passing. Her co-worker and office associate, Suzanne Brown, intrigued and in disbelief, Googles the recent Census data. “It’s actually 604,” she says.
Meadville is the government seat of Franklin County, a 567-square-mile patch of rural America — one square mile for every 14 people. There are only two traffic lights here but more than two dozen churches. The 1,075-square-foot Okhissa Lake supplies residents with recreational pastimes — fishing and boating — and the dense Homochitto National Forest ensures the area is always awash in emerald green.
The county is astride both sides of the digital age: 70% of its residents have internet access, but only 9% have bandwidth enough to stream an ultra-high-definition video.
There is one hospital with 25 beds, but 14% of people don’t have health insurance to avail themselves of it. None have access to a brand-name pharmacy within the county’s borders.
