Banners in red cursive hang above the slick roads in downtown Beaumont. “Classic Movie Nights” are now canceled. The local BBQ joints have shuttered and the sheriff, donning a cowboy hat and a face mask, is a stark reminder the virus is here in small town Texas.
The main road is a straight shot to the Jefferson County Courthouse, where the Southeast Texas Regional Emergency Operations Center is activated. Rural towns are accustomed to being isolated from the rest of the world, after all, that’s how the locals prefer it.
“We are small fish on our own out here,” says Autumn Brown, with the EOC logistics team. “This time, it’s crunch time.”
Brown rolls the courthouse dolly to the curbside and waits in the rain for donations. “Yeah we are used to storms” she says while catching rain on her flat palm. “Storms we can handle, not a medical emergency.” The ever flooding Houston is nearby and just a few years ago Hurricane Harvey hit, those are the emergencies Brown’s team prepares for.
Now the emergency management team is taking every precaution. Court hearings and council meetings have been halted. Only emergency personnel filter in and out of the town staple.
Nurses wearing masks and gloves guard the entrances to the courthouse. One nurse takes everyone’s temperate that enters the building, while a security guard records the numbers she reads aloud from the thermometer. A second nurse sprays sanitizer on those who enter.
“We just couldn’t continue” Brown says as she rolls in 12 monitors and 40 laptops loaned to the small town’s efforts by the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center. “We are absolutely overwhelmed and couldn’t continue to take on the data that was coming in with the equipment we had.”
The county will now use the extra laptops to record data from the call center they’ve set up. Locals from Beaumont and several towns over can call in and report their symptoms. The call center then collects personal information and redirect them to a testing site or hospital. The data is then recorded and mapped by the emergency management team.
The data from the call center helps the EOC track the numbers of those infected and then later recording the number the positive and negative tests preformed at the medical sites.
Though they are tucked away from the big city, being responsible for the well being of farmers isn’t easy. The area Brown’s team is responsible reaches up to Harris County, right at Houston’s front door. That’s hours and miles of land.
“We aren’t that big and yet our team is covering all the way to Harris county, that’s a lot of land, that’s 6 counties” Brown says.
Social distancing is easier in rural areas, but the virus is still spreading. It may be safe to be in a small town now, but as the pandemic reaches further into the United States, those in rural communities are left without big city resources. Rural health systems and emergency management teams are already stretched financially.
Identifying unmet technical needs in rural communities is a priority for ITDRC, to ensure small towns are not being overlooked. Cities have resources to unlock, small towns are being impacted later but with less guidance. The the Texas based nonprofit is providing surge resources to the patchwork of small towns that make up the country.
Rural communities are starting to experiencing some of the highest rates of COVID 19 cases. Beaumont Health is currently caring for nearly 847 confirmed COVID-19 patients that have been admitted. 61 patients admitted to its hospitals have COVID-19 test results pending.
According to the U.S. census, around 15% of people in the United States live in rural areas. More than 20% of the population that lives in rural counties are 65 and older. Most importantly, the average rural communities live 30 miles away from a hospital.
Right now Brown and her team are preparing for the worst. COVID-19 has only just arrived in their community, and the virus is expected to reach peak numbers in Beaumont within the next week. That impact will then ripple out to the other 6 counties her team is responsible for.
“Our town isn’t safe from this virus” says Brown. “And all we can do is brace ourselves for the week ahead.”
