QUINTER, Kan. ‒ Joni Kerns coughed behind her surgical mask as she greeted a customer at the Dairy Queen she has owned here for 25 years.
Kerns is suffering through her sixth bout of COVID-19, this time caught, she thinks, on a bucket-list trip to Las Vegas.
“Surviving so far,” she said. “Still among the living.”
Five years after the coronavirus began spreading around the world, it is still shaping how Americans live, work, eat and connect with neighbors. The virus was first flagged for international attention on Jan. 1, 2020.
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Nationwide, the pandemic sparked furious battles over masks, social distancing, school and business closures, and vaccine mandates.
In rural Quinter, as elsewhere across the country, the months after COVID-19’s arrival ignited a still-simmering battle over the proper role of government in managing public health, fomented distrust between longtime neighbors and weakened community bonds. People stopped speaking to each other. Some refused to patronize a restaurant that tried to enforce mask rules, and it closed for lack of customers. Health care workers quit in frustration and fear.
Kerns said COVID-19 worsened her diabetes and her husband’s hearing and led to heart problems for her daughter.
Still, she stopped getting vaccinated after the initial round. Right now, she also has the flu ‒ she said she’ll get that vaccine next time, but not one for COVID-19, even though she knows the risk of long COVID, with its brain fog, breathlessness and other lingering symptoms.
“I just feel that God’s in control here. If he says it’s my time, it’s my time,” she said, coughing again.
For a time in late 2020, Quinter’s surrounding Gove County had the nation’s highest death rate from COVID-19, driven in large part by an outbreak of deaths in the community’s nursing home. In a span of days, 17 elderly residents died out of a population of just 2,600.
Statewide, about 10,000 Kansans and more than 1.2 million Americans died from the virus, according to federal health officials. About 3.5% of Americans have symptoms that linger more than 3 months after COVID-19 infections, according to a study in December.
For the first few months of the pandemic, residents in places like Quinter told themselves the worst would pass them by. The nearest big city, Denver, is about 250 miles west, and Kansas City is 300 miles to the east. But Interstate 70 runs along Quinter’s bottom edge, and Kerns’ Dairy Queen is a popular stop for travelers.
And although Quinter has a small grocery store and a Dollar General, residents who want anything from Walmart or other stores have to make a 50-mile drive east or west.
No one is exactly sure how and when the coronavirus first arrived in Quinter, but by early November 2020, it was killing nursing home residents, among them the town’s unofficial historian and a longtime community volunteer. Experts had predicted elderly people with preexisting conditions would be most at risk. And like many rural communities, the residents of Gove County are on average older, poorer and sicker than their urban counterparts.
In a community small enough for people to know which of their neighbors are taking weight loss drugs, what car everyone drives, and what they’re probably going to order for takeout at Melanie’s Kitchen Asian Cuisine, it’s hard to avoid running into one another.
“People are still angry,” said Undersheriff Mike Haase. “I know there’s relationships that were ruined because of choices made during COVID.”
Haase is still coping with the loss of longtime Gove County Sheriff Allan Weber, who died in December 2020 in a Denver hospital after a two-month battle with COVID-19. During the pandemic, Haase was one of a core group of community leaders who ran the county’s Emergency Operations Center. He remains frustrated that efforts to protect community health spiraled into vicious political battles when people were dying.
“I lost some pretty good friends and a damn good boss,” Haase said.
In August 2020, just before deaths began, Gove County leaders ordered everyone to wear masks in public, then backtracked two weeks later after a series of angry confrontations with their constituents.
Around the same time, someone anonymously reported the county’s COVID-19 information Facebook page as “fake news,” and it was temporarily taken offline just as public officials were trying to warn residents of the danger. A high school teacher who offered extra credit to students who got vaccinated was nearly fired.
Local officials say the problems were exacerbated by then-President Donald Trump’s inconsistent messaging about the effectiveness of masks, the danger posed by the infection and even the wisdom of being vaccinated, though he had funded the vaccine’s development. Trump won Gove County with 88% of the vote in 2020 and 2024.
Like many small communities, Gove County is far more conservative than America as a whole, in part because of the presence of the Dunkard Brethren, a Protestant faith from Germany. Members of that church wear plain, anachronistic clothing, including bonnets and long dresses for women, and reject having television in their homes.
Keith Orejel, a history professor and expert on rural America, said research indicates that the coronavirus may ultimately be seen as a “particularly cruel capstone” to the struggles faced by communities like Quinter, where the paved roads of the small downtown quickly run out into dirt roads cutting through corn and sorghum fields.
The number of people living in rural areas nationally has been slowly declining, he said, as jobs increasingly shift to urban areas. Orajel, a professor at Wilmington College in Ohio, said COVID-19 sparked a small bump in rural populations as people who could work remotely online moved to small towns, but he predicted that would ultimately reverse.
COVID-19 was particularly dangerous to the fabric of small towns, he said, because social distancing restrictions interrupted long-standing patterns of volunteerism and community connections. He said the generally older residents who participated in things like the Elks club or planning commission meetings ‒ the lifeblood of small towns ‒ found themselves socially isolated and in general just stopped participating.
“Once you get out of volunteerism, it’s really hard to get back,” Orajel said. “Those were trends that have been impacting rural communities forever, and especially in the last couple decades, and it’s very, very likely that COVID aggravated that.”
Haase, the undersheriff, sees the loss of that community daily. In addition to working as one of a handful of law enforcement officers, Haase also runs the local ambulance service and struggles to find neighbors willing to volunteer. That’s a problem, he said, because Gove County has seen more drug overdoses since the pandemic hit.
He said he also has seen an increase in mental health struggles, and, from his position as a deputy, a loss in respect for law enforcement and government in general.
“There are people who I know don’t like me, and I’m still going to help them,” he said. “You’re not really looking at a popularity contest. You’re looking at trying to save the most lives possible.”
One of the Quinter institutions most battered by the pandemic is the Gove County Medical Center, a small complex of low buildings on the town’s west side. It’s the area’s single-largest employer, with about 160 workers. And because it also ran the nursing home, it has remained a flashpoint of both hope and frustration within the community.
Hospital administrators in summer 2023 closed down the nursing home, arguing that federal care reimbursements weren’t keeping pace with costs, which put the hospital’s overall finances at risk. By closing the 29-resident unit, the hospital stabilized its budget, said Gove County Medical Center CEO Conner Fiscarelli.
Many Gove County residents are bitter because the closure meant their aging parents were transferred to facilities 50 miles away. And some are mad because they believe the hospital’s decision to use outside staffing agencies to supplement local workers is what brought COVID-19 into the facility in the first place.
Nationally, more than 770 nursing homes have closed since 2020, displacing nearly 30,000 residents, according to a report in August by the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living.
Despite the frustration some Gove County residents express over the loss of the nursing home, 56% of voters this fall extended an existing sales tax supporting the hospital. Fiscarelli said he still sees strong turnout for hospital-organized events, which tells him Quinter’s community fabric remains strong.
“Industries like health care and schools, that’s what keep small communities going,” Fiscarelli said. “We’re here to support them and they’re here to support us, and that’s the best thing we can ask for in a small community.”
Kerns, the Dairy Queen owner, is among those frustrated by how the hospital managed the nursing home closure. But she also acknowledges just how hard it is to find workers. Her restaurant often has to close when no one is available to work, she said, and she hopes to sell it soon and retire.
She’s frustrated no one from Quinter wanted to buy the restaurant, and she marks that reticence down to the same loss of community that she believes spread with COVID-19. Unlike in years past, there are multiple homes for sale in the small gridded downtown, along with many empty commercial buildings along Main Street.
She worries about the future of her hometown after the pandemic, about the relationships that were forever altered, and the lingering economic struggles.
“Nobody wants to put in the effort it takes,” she said. “COVID really changed us. It really did.”
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