COVID-19: This Is the Deadliest County in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 11, 9:40AM EST

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COVID-19: This Is the Deadliest County in America — © Go Nakamura / Getty Images News via Getty Images

As the rate of new cases of COVID-19 continues to decline, the effort to get back to “normal” has become a race between vaccination on one hand and what many experts believe are careless efforts to reopen the economy on the other. The decision by Texas Governor Gregory Abbott to drop the mask mandate of the nation’s second-largest state caused particular consternation among those who want to allow vaccination rates to rise further before public gatherings begin.

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States number 29,465,761. The rate at which they rise on a daily basis has dropped by two-thirds in the past two months. However, the figure remains about 25% of the world’s total. Fatal cases total 534,746, which is a fifth of the global total.

The national vaccination rate has risen steadily for the past three weeks and has reached 19% for those who have received at least one dose. Just under 10% have had two shots. A total of 127,869,155 doses have been delivered, and from those 95,721,290 shots have been given.

Public health officials use measures other than raw numbers to determine the presence and spread of the disease. Often, the figures used are deaths and cases per 100,000 people. This allows comparisons from state to state and county to county on an apples-to-apples basis, because it adjusts for population counts.
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The United States has more than 3,000 counties. The one hardest hit, as measured by deaths per 100,000 people over the past 14 days, is McMullen County, Texas, at 10.79. This county is due south of San Antonio, toward the Mexican border. Corpus Christi is to its southeast, on the Gulf of Mexico.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, McMullen County has a population of 743, and that population is 54% white and 42% Hispanic. The median household income in the county is $62,000, slightly below the national average. At 10.5%, the poverty rate is close to the national number.

Second on the list of deadliest counties is Sullivan County, Pennsylvania. It is northeast of the Wilkes-Barre and Scranton area. Its figure is 6.94, and its population is 6,177.

The third worst county based on recent deaths per 100,000 is Menard County, Texas, at 6.73. It is followed by Henderson County, Illinois, at 6.23. Its population is 6,884. In fifth place, the number in Motley County, Texas, is 6.18, and the population there is 1,156.

These five counties show how horribly COVID-19 can and has hit small, rural counties. McMullen will fall from the top of the list, as have dozens of counties since the pandemic began, but the damage will have been done.

Click here to see which state was the first to vaccinate 25% of its population.
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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.