There is no escaping this thing:
To hear year-round Sun Valley, Idaho, residents like Justin Malloy tell it, town right now is as crowded as you’d expect to see it in the peak Fourth of July or Christmas seasons. The small airport is packed with private jets. And then there’s the parking lot at the Atkinsons’ Supermarket, one of only two in town where bread and essential cleaning items are particularly hard to come by.
“We’ve been seeing a lot of Washington plates, a lot of California plates, their cars just full of all of their stuff that they’ve brought from out of state,” Malloy says.
This has fueled outrage on social media, and on unusually crowded hiking and ski trails, where locals are wondering aloud whether rich people are fleeing cities to seek refuge in rural Idaho, and unknowingly making the public health crisis here even worse.
“It’s a little frustrating to see people that are basically coming here to take a vacation,” Malloy says.
Some regions in the rural West are still reporting very low numbers of COVID-19 cases. But there are pockets with high infection rates: wealthy resort towns like Sun Valley and adjoining Ketchum, Idaho, that have a lot of visitor traffic from around the country and world.
“I just hope that some of these people aren’t bringing this disease with them,” Malloy says.
Most of this for now is anecdotal. There’s no way to know how many people have driven into the Wood River Valley. In recent days, flight data at the local Hailey-Sun Valley Airport did show private and commercial flights from places such as Salt Lake City, Seattle and Southern California continuing.
But local hospital officials say they are seeing one of the highest rates of known cases in the entire U.S.
“It seems likely that people were fleeing other places and not recognizing that they were then bringing the disease with them from Seattle, or other areas where they might live part time,” says Dr. Josh Kern, vice president of medical affairs for St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center in Ketchum.
While resort towns like this can typically house a lot of tourists or second- and third-home owners, that doesn’t extend to St. Luke’s, which has only 25 beds. The hospital has had dozens of COVID-related admissions and officials warn there are likely many more cases in the community than what’s been diagnosed.
That’s leading to some impassioned pleas to take the recent, strict self-isolation orders seriously.
“No one should come here,” says Dr. Brent Russell, a local emergency room physician.
Russell should know. He has COVID-19. He’s been very sick, so can’t work at this critical time.
“We have a really high percent of COVID spreading among the population here,” Russell says. “If you come here, that is putting your life at risk and it’s putting other lives at risk.”
Trump said today that he might quarantine New York, New Jersey and Connecticut because too many people are going to Florida (where he happens to have a bunch of properties and needs the electoral votes next November.) He reflexively lied, saying that he’s already talked to Cuomo, but Cuomo said he knew nothing about it and didn’t see how such a thing was workable.
Other states are talking about shutting their borders. Deborah Birx made some ill-advised comments about shutting down counties which is clearly daft unless we start putting up roadblocks and arresting people for crossing county lines. I won’t even mention the impossibility of maintaining our already tenuous supply lines.
If everyone who isn’t absolutely essential voluntarily stays inside their own homes this won’t be necessary. I can certainly see why someone would want to leave New York right now and I don’t blame anyone for making that decision. But Californians really have no excuse and neither does anyone else. We just have to hunker down.