I'd rather live in an urban area during a pandemic.
Consider yourself an outlier. I subscribe to several regional real estate newsletters, and for the last five months they've been all about people moving out of the cities and into small towns.
It's counter-intuitive but the access to testing and hospitals is very important.
As with any disease, the best treatment is prevention. Which is what being rural gives you.
However, if you’re able to work from home, you can self-isolate pretty much anywhere, and drive wherever you need to get food.
If urban environments start seriously breaking down due to a food supply chain problem, rural areas won’t be safe from desperate people.
Anyway, both approaches have their pros and cons, but as someone who has a fairly severe back problem and not much inclination to try to live off the grid, I’d rather be in an urban area.
A friend of mine who served in Afghanistan said that the Afghanis living in the mountains had no idea America had invaded and no idea about a war or 9/11. At first they had thought the Americans were Russians.
I think you over estimate how big America is and how remote some places can be.
I've traveled through some pretty remote places in both hemispheres, and the US has nothing on isolation compared to the mountains in Central Asia. Remoteness won't really protect people here, not like it would there.
> rural areas won’t be safe from desperate people.
That's why you need to buy yourself a private, remote island, or at least a farm on a remote island. Also, if you don't live on it alone (regardless of ownership), it may not import more food than it exports, otherwise the other inhabitants will want to get your food.
Of course this is hard to find such an island as there aren't many such places and unless you're very rich it'll be beyond your budget anyways.
Also want to stress again that it won't be enough to just have an island, it has to be remote as well otherwise people just swim over. The number of boats is limited usually so likely few people will get to you.
Not even "barely more". With 30 seconds on Google I found a 6 acre private island in Northern Ontario with a fully furnished 2200 sq ft house connected to marine electric and phone service for 360k USD.
Something more remote is even cheaper, because there's a ton of supply of islands that are only accessible by float plane, and not much demand.
I don't know if rural folks may realize how well-armed we are in the cities. Nearly everyone I know has a gun, and none of us is the crowd you'd normally associate with gun owners in cities.
Per capital is higher in rural, but there are going to be more guns in a N mile radius of you in the city, and a lot more armed individuals (ten people with one gun each are more dangerous than one person with ten guns).
Is it possible that the stats are of the flavor (total guns)/(total people) and inflate rural ownership because of a gun for small game, a gun for large game, a gun for self defense, and in certain parts of the country a gun for extremely big fish? Or is gun ownership when computed as (count of people with guns)/(total people) still inflated in rural areas?
As kortilla mentioned, while you may have a different experience, the statistics are pretty clear. Also, not all firearms are equal, and while I can't back this part up with stats, my general experience has been that rural folk are much more likely to own more effective firearms: many own a semi-automatic rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge and some own semi-autos chambered for a full rifle cartridge. Both are a lot more deadly than grandad's pump-action shotgun or a 22 lr plinking rifle, which is closer to what most city folk seem to own. All that aside, most rural people use firearms more often rather than keeping them in closets "just in case" and therefore will be much more effective.
I guess it depends on whether you are vulnerable health-wise. If you're fit and healthy and not of retirement age I really can't understand this kind of thinking.
Yes, this is so true. My spouse has a rare chronic condition and moving anywhere rural is a non-starter. Even with great doctors in a big city, it's still a struggle getting the care she needs. I can't imagine if we lived somewhere with less than stellar healthcare.
> I'd rather live in an urban area during a pandemic.
Depends what kind of pandemic. If being in a city increased your exposure and infection rates 10 fold, and the disease is a killer without treatment, it's a lot worse to live in a city.
> But if you NEED to isolate yourself it’s much easier to do in the countryside than in a city.
In practice there are several flaws in that assumption. The lack of grocery deliveries is one major issue with rural isolation. Keep digging and you find several short vs long term issues. Consider, if you need a car you then need to eventually take it in for repairs etc.
In rural areas you have more space to stock food to live completely off the usual distribution networks for a longer time. In cities if you live in a small apartment you are tributary to shopping very often or having deliveries frequently, which increases the chance of contamination.
You can keep a years supply of food in a small closet. Everyone can’t suddenly buy a years supply of food in a crisis. Which is how this really plays out, if everyone tries to suddenly stock up on supplies that fails. So space is not a limiting factor in a pandemic.
Further, going to work is a larger concern. A higher percentage of people in cities can WFH indefinitely.
https://theconversation.com/rural-america-is-more-vulnerable...