COVID-19: This Is the Deadliest County in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 22, 7:24AM EDT

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COVID-19: This Is the Deadliest County in America — © clevergrrl / Flickr

The rates at which COVID-19 confirmed cases in America have risen in the past few days have taken daily counts to near-record levels. For several days in the past two weeks, the number jumped above 60,000. The winter may be worse. Fatal case rates have not been as bad as when the nation was hardest hit by this measure from early April to mid-May, when the counts rose above 2,000 nationwide on some days. Yet, the number of coronavirus fatalities has begun to near 1,000 a day recently.

Rates of both confirmed and fatal cases are highly uneven across the nation. In some counties, particularly in the South, death rates have reached extremely high levels. One county in Georgia had the highest death rate by far on October 20.

Hancock County, Georgia, had a death rate of 5.16 per 1,000 people. The national figure is less than one, so the Hancock figure is over five times “normal.” Hancock County sits east of Atlanta. Its average population over the past five years was 8,535. That population is made up mostly of Black Americans. In the county seat, Sparta, 84% of the population was Black, according to the 2010 Census, while 15% of the population was white.

Georgia is the sixth hardest-hit state, based on confirmed cases of 343,750. Fatal cases number 7,704.
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The next hardest-hit county is Emporia, Virginia, with 5.02 deaths per 1,000 people on October 20. The county has a five-year average population of 5,381. It is in the southern part of the state, near the North Carolina border. Galax County, also near the border, ranks third by the same measure at 4.52. Its population is 6,638.

Next on the list based on deaths per 1,000 is Randolph County, Georgia, near the Alabama border. Its rate was 4.09 on the 20th, and it has a five-year average population of 7,087. Just behind it, East Feliciana, Louisiana, came in at 3.85, with a population of 19,499.

Another measure of how hard a county has been hit is confirmed cases per 1,000. On October 20, this figure was highest in Trousdale, Tennessee, where the number was 182.07. The county has a five-year average population of 9,573. Lincoln Country, Arkansas, was next at 162.65. Its five-year average population is 13,695.

Chattahoochee, Georgia, followed with a confirmed case rate of 160.49 and a population of 10,767. Next on this list are Lafayette, Florida, at 144.44 (population 8,744) and Lake, Tennessee, at 128.89 (population 7,526).

Each county, based both on confirmed death rates and on confirmed case rates, is in the South, as well as in relatively rural areas.

As the disease spreads, more and more counties are likely to post figures higher than they have since May. However, few will come anywhere close to the number in Hancock County.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.