Rural Georgia Is Always Slow to Recover From Disasters

This week, an update on a few data points I track in my Trouble in God’s Country research.

I’ve been working on TIGC for more than a decade now, and one pattern I’ve seen over and over is this: When just about any kind of disaster befalls the State of Georgia, it usually throws a hard punch at Metro Atlanta first, then moves on and works over rural areas even harder. But Metro Atlanta is quicker to recover, and rural Georgia in some cases still hasn’t made a full comeback.

That was true of the Great Recession and COVID. The Great Recession hit in 2007. My 12-county TIGC Metro Atlanta suffered a 4.2% drop in total personal income (TPI) over the next two years. TPI growth in the other 157 counties softened up a little, but actually continued to climb a bit during those two years, rising 2.5% during that 2007–2009 period.  

But then Metro Atlanta came roaring back. In 2011, it had eclipsed its pre-recession high water mark by more than $10 billion in total personal income, and the 12 counties’ total income has been growing dramatically ever since. By 2020, it was up 79.6% over its 2009 low point. The other 157 counties grew only 55.2% in that same period.

The situation with COVID was similar. It rolled into Metro Atlanta (and other urban areas), taking an early toll in confirmed cases and deaths. Rural Georgians were skeptical the bug would find its way outside I-285 and into the hinterlands, but it did—and with a vengeance. Throughout 2020 and ’21, I tracked and mapped its movement across southeast Georgia and compared it to Sherman’s march to the sea.  

In addition to their skepticism about the danger COVID posed, rural Georgians were more vulnerable on at least two counts: They were older and significantly less healthy than Metro Atlantans, and local health care was, to be charitable, much less robust. The results are clear in data from the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH).

For the four-year period 2020–2023, according to DPH data, 10,067 of the 179,532 deaths recorded in TIGC’s 12-county Metro Atlanta region were attributed to COVID—5.6% of the total.  That was a lower percentage than any of the other regions of the state. In TIGC’s 56-county South Georgia region, 7.8% of the total deaths were attributed to COVID, and the total number of COVID deaths outside Metro Atlanta for the four-year period was more than 22,000.

Then, of course, came Hurricane Helene. It’s too early to have a full accounting of the storm damage or have a sense for how long the recovery process will take or what it will cost. But my hunch is we’ll see something similar to the Great Recession and COVID patterns. Rural Georgia, especially southeast of Macon, will have a tougher slog digging out and repairing the damage.  

Not unrelated to the unhappy picture above is an update on what I call the TIGC Burials to Baptisms Ratio. Nearly a decade ago, I stumbled across the fact that a growing number of Georgia counties—almost entirely rural—were recording more deaths than births each year.  This was in 2016, and the first time I used the data was in a presentation to the opening session of the Georgia House Rural Development Council in April 2017.

The latest data available at the time was for 2015, and the total number of Georgia counties reporting more deaths than births then was 60 out of 159. DPH has data going back to 1994 that showed that for the first 15 years, the number of counties reporting more deaths than births floated up and down between a low of eight and a high of 18. So, no big news.

But then things began to change. That number started stair-stepping up in 2010, as we were coming out of the Great Recession. It jumped to 26 in 2010, then climbed steadily to 60 in 2015.  That was the number I reported to the HRDC, and I think it’s fair to say it got their attention.  I can still remember eyebrows rising and jaws dropping.  

Frankly, I figured 60 was probably the high-water mark for this unhappy statistic. I was wrong. The number of counties with more deaths than births continued climbing steadily over the next few years, hitting 78 in 2019.

Then came COVID. In 2020, 118 counties reported more deaths than births; in ’21, that number peaked at 124 before dropping to 109 in ’22. The latest numbers from DPH, for 2023, put the number of counties reporting more deaths than births at 93, returning, it seems to me, to pre-COVID trends.

Charles Hayslett is the author of the long-running troubleingodscountry.com blog. He is also the Scholar in Residence at the Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University. The views expressed in his columns are his own and are not necessarily those of the center or the university.

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