For some, rural life may seem easier, calmer and healthier than the hustle and bustle of city living. However, a recent study shows that rural life could actually lead to dying faster.
According to the study, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, death rates for men and women were higher in rural areas compared to urban ones from 1999 to 2019. Rates widened throughout the 20-year period.
By 2019, rates for the 10 leading causes of death in the U.S.
were all higher in rural areas. Conditions with the greatest disparity included heart disease, cancer and chronic lower respiratory disease.
Overall, rural Americans are 20 percent more likely than urban dwellers to die from these illnesses.
Lack of access to health care, poverty, smoking and heavy drinking all play a role in driving up the divide, said USA Today. Hospital closures amid the COVID-19 pandemic added to the gap.
Based on data from the Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis at the University of Iowa, rural Americans die from COVID-19 at twice the rate of urban Americans. Vaccination rates are lower in rural areas, which could be explained by lower educational attainment in those areas, as well as support for former President Donald Trump, according to Syracuse University News.
Although Trump himself is vaccinated, his supporters have appealed to anti-vaccine sentiment.
Apart from their stance on COVID-19 vaccines, a tendency for rural residents to have unhealthy eating and lack of exercise could contribute to the widening health differences, said Dr. Varinder Singh, chair of the cardiology department at New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital, according to USA Today.
“People continue to do things that are not good for them.
But that's human nature and you have to deal with that,” he said.
Only around one in five Americans actually live in rural areas, according to USA Today. However, they take up 80 percent of the country’s land. Much of the nation’s food, oil, gas and critical supplies come from that land, said Brock Slabach, chief operations officer for the National Rural Health Association.
When people who produce those goods are ill, it has a reverberating impact on cities through supply chain issues.
Slabach said that 130 rural hospitals closed in the past decade. At the same time, health care costs rose, rural populations aged, federal reimbursements stagnated and younger people left for city jobs, Slabach said. Approximately 1,800 rural hospitals cover nearly 97 percent of the nation’s land and provide just 1 percent of intensive care unit beds, according to an analysis by doctors from the National Institutes of Health.
With people spread out over wide swaths of land, rural areas also have infrastructure handicaps compared to cities when it comes to health. Singh explained that the amount of time it takes for an ambulance to arrive in rural settings is a “major factor” in health incidents.
Last month in a rural mountaintop restaurant outside of Denver, Co., college professor Glen Mays helped administer CPR to a fellow diner who collapsed with a heart attack, said USA Today.
“It was exhausting,” said Mays, who helped the woman, aged approximately 60, for around 35 minutes before first responders arrived. “I knew as soon as it happened that it would be 30 minutes or more until we got an ambulance up there.”
The ambulance had to make it up a canyon on the outskirts of Denver.
A federal study found that ambulances take an average of seven minutes to arrive at their destination nationwide. In rural areas, that can stretch to 14 to 35 minutes.
Once people get to a hospital, care is generally consistent in both rural and urban areas due to federal regulations and other standards, said Singh. Even so, it can be hard for rural hospitals to retain talented staff, said hospital administrator Conner Fiscarelli of Grove County, Kan., which at one point this fall had the highest COVID-19 rate per capita.
While rural life has documented health risks, Singh said health care disparities exist in urban areas too, especially for communities of color. Singh and other experts agree that education and public health messages could help address the growing divide between rural and urban health outcomes.
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