In Forest county, Wisconsin on Friday, the health director was having a day off and the mayor was in Florida. Is such calm admirable or ill-advised?

Melissa Rosio grabbed a disinfectant wipe and ran it over the handle of her shopping cart. Coronavirus? The 31-year-old shook her head.

“I see how people don’t wash their hands when they leave the bathroom. That grosses me out,” she said.

“I think coronavirus is being blown out of proportion. It’s just like any other flu. It’s attacking the elders and people that have other health issues going on. It’s taking an impact on them versus the healthy 30-year-olds that takes care of themselves.”

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Rosio is not alone in rural northern Wisconsin, in her view that too much fuss is being made about the global pandemic that is creeping ever closer, even as the president declared a state of emergency.

“I’m a little bit bothered because my dad is not one to go to the doctor and my grandpa, he’s going through chemo right now,” she said. “I don’t shake hands with people. I work in human resources so when I do interviews I do the elbow bump. But I think some people are making too much of it. I guess we’ll see what happens.”

What might be regarded as admirable calm or reckless nonchalance appears to be reflected among some local officials. Wisconsin has 19 confirmed coronavirus cases, up from just one a week ago. The governor has declared a health emergency and ordered the closure of all schools.

They’re having really cheap flights right now and so I’m thinking, what the heck, I might just go some place Peggy Osterman

But in Forest county, on Wisconsin’s northern border, the health department makes no mention of the virus on its website and has no notices at its offices. Its most recent public health alert is for eastern equine encephalitis and the front of its website features an appeal for drivers to take drinkers home from bars in order to cut road deaths.

On Friday, the staff said the health director was having the day off and preparing to go away for the weekend.

The office of the mayor of Crandon, the Forest county seat of about 1,900 people, said he was in Florida for two weeks.

There was a time when towns such as Crandon might have sealed themselves off from the rest of the US, as some did during the flu epidemic a century ago, but these days the threat of contagion is perhaps less from outsiders arriving than residents bringing the virus back after travelling to work or shop.

Many shop at a Walmart, about half an hour’s drive away in Rhinelander, which draws customers from far and wide. There was little sign of panic buying beyond the absence of hand sanitiser and an entire aisle of empty metal shelves where the toilet paper used to be.

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Peggy Osterman took a picture of it to send to her children with the message: “Look, this is crazy.”

Osterman, 63, picked up a carton of sanitising wipes from the shelves opposite. Was this a sign she was worried about contracting the virus?

“No! They’re having really cheap flights right now and so I’m thinking, what the heck, I might just go some place. Somebody told me Hawaii was $400. I’m not worried one bit,” she said.

Osterman said she planned to use the wipes to clean the seat on the plane.

There’s not sufficient consciousness of social distancing because that’s not the message people are getting from the top A doctor

“I don’t think it’s any worse than the flu. I fault our government because I think they were not on the ball and they should just have said: ‘Hey people, don’t worry.’ But I think the media pushed and pushed and got people panicking. It’s the flu. People who are dying are people who are older, who are sick. Which is sad.”

As for the absence of toilet paper, Osterman puts that down less to people preparing for self-isolation than a fear that it comes from China and will run out.

“I work in a dental office right now and we can’t get supplies,” she said. “We can’t get floss, we can only order so many masks and so many gloves because everybody’s taking it. People are just panicking a little more than they should.”

Crandon’s medical facilities are limited to a primary care clinic and so patients in need of more serious medical treatment have to go to hospital in Rhinelander.

A doctor, who declined to be named because the hospital group he works for had not given him authorisation to speak, said he was concerned at apparent indifference among a lot of people in the area and blamed the Trump administration and sections of conservative media for downplaying the risk.

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“There’s not sufficient consciousness of social distancing because that’s not the message people are getting from the top,” he said.

The doctor also questioned whether health facilities in rural Wisconsin will be able to cope with a sudden increase in infections, with most lacking sufficient test kits and respirators for more than a small number of patients.

“The systems in this country are not well prepared for this sort of public health emergency,” he said. “They don’t work well together. We don’t have the supplies we need. We’re not testing nearly as many people as we should, even those who look like they may have symptoms.”