Team News Riveting
Even as the United States (U.S.) has been reeling under the severe impact of COVID-19, there are a few countries within the world’s powerful nation left from the blow.
Three counties – technically two and a borough – remain as the lone holdouts, fighting off the virus and reporting no cases of COVID-19 so far. They are Esmeralda County in Nevada, Loving County in Texas and Skagway in Alaska, which uses the term “boroughs’’ rather than “counties.’’
All three are remotely located and have fewer than 1,100 residents—a major factor in protecting them to escape a scourge that has sickened 7.9 million Americans and killed more than 216,000.
Esmeralda, with 826 residents over nearly 3,600 square miles, and Loving, with 169 residents spread over 677 square miles, have the smallest population per area of any counties in the contiguous U.S.
Skagway is more densely populated with 1,095 residents concentrated on 20 blocks, but the port hamlet on the southeastern panhandle of Alaska – near the northern edge of British Columbia – is surrounded by mountains and reachable mostly by air or water. Road travel into Canada has been restricted because of the pandemic.
When King County in Texas registered the first coronavirus infection among its approximately 280 inhabitants Tuesday, those three counties were left as the final pieces of unbroken resistance to the virus.
