COVID-19: This Tiny County Is America’s Hotspot

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 26, 9:48AM EST

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COVID-19: This Tiny County Is America’s Hotspot — © Alex Potemkin / E+ via Getty Images

The spread of COVID-19 has raced at an accelerating speed across America. Its 25,501,479 confirmed cases are about a quarter of the world’s 99,706,375 total. American coronavirus deaths have hit 425,249, which is nearly 20% of the world’s 2,139,803. Yet, the United States has only slightly more than 4% of the world’s population.

Hospitals in many cities have intensive care unit beds that are nearly full or have reached total capacity. President Joe Biden expects 600,000 American deaths by the spring. In the shadow of the spread, many places have run low on vaccine doses, and production and distribution remain slow. Drug giant Merck recently announced its trials for a vaccine had failed.

While the disease has spread across most of America has slowed in some areas, its effects remain uneven. In some situations, the yardstick for this is total deaths and cases. Another measure is cases and deaths per 100,000, which allows for a direct comparison from county to county and state to state.

America’s COVID-19 hotspots, another measure, are defined as counties with the highest number of recent cases among the population, calculated as a seven-day average. Based on this, Forest County, Pennsylvania, is the worst hotspot in the country by a very wide margin. Cases per 100,000 over the past seven days number 1,021, well ahead of the next county, Dimmit, Texas, where the number is 292.
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Forest County is in western Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border. It is southeast of Erie and north of Pittsburgh. Its population is 7,247, based on census data for 2019. That is down 6% in the past decade. About 72% of the county’s population is white, another 21% Black and 7% Hispanic.

Forest County is poor by most measures. The median value of an owner-occupied home is $95,900, well less than 50% of the American average. The median household income for the county is $39,717, barely more than half the national number. The poverty rate is a staggering 26%.

It is notable that the spread of COVID-19 and fatalities have been linked to poverty in some studies.

Forest County will come off the list of COVID-10 hotspots sometime in the next several weeks. No county holds the top spot indefinitely. In the meantime, the devastation there must be unimaginable.
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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.