Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural America

Rural people have been left out of the vast majority of research on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, our evidence-based understanding of the pandemic in the United States is incomplete, and rural recovery policies risk being informed by anecdotal or urban-centric information. We begin to complete this picture by measuring and assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural well-being in the North American West. Findings show there have been significant impacts on health-related and economic dimensions of well-being, and that these impacts are shared across sex, age, ethnicity, and education.