As of Thursday, there are, according to the C.D.C., thirty-one confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state of Georgia, and one person in the state has reportedly died from the illness. At first, all of the cases were located in the northern part of the state. Then one of southwest Georgia’s largest regional hospitals, Phoebe Putney, in Albany, reported two cases, a traveller and a local. Dr. Karen Kinsell, who runs a small health clinic sixty miles from Albany, in Fort Gaines, Georgia, was at a meeting when she heard. “People were kind of, like, getting uncomfortable,” Kinsell told me Wednesday night. “It suddenly seemed like we’re talking about us.”

Kinsell runs her small private clinic out of a former Tastee-Freez. She is the only doctor in Clay County, where forty per cent of the population lives under the poverty line. She has a unique view of rural health care in times of normalcy as well as crisis, and I’ve spoken to her periodically over the years. “We have more older people,” Kinsell told me yesterday, “and they tend to be sicker.” Kinsell has not yet seen a case of COVID-19 at her clinic, nor has anyone asked her to be tested yet, though she is bracing for that eventuality. In the meantime, she worries as much about the spread of information as the spread of the virus. Clay County does not have a dedicated paper of its own—it qualifies as a so-called news desert. “We started a monthly not long ago,” Kinsell told me. “It’s mailed to every address in Clay County. So there will be an article in it next month about this.” That story may be a bit “stale” by that point, she said, laughing. “We’d like to make the paper more online,” she added.

Kinsell spoke to me by phone about how the spreading COVID-19 outbreak could impact southwest Georgia. Her account has been edited and condensed.

On Friday, after this post was published, Kinsell shut her clinic. “Have a headache and achy today, no fever yet, so closed the office,” she said. “We just got the test kits, so I did one. Guy just called with 104 temp, directed him to E.R.” The emergency room is an hour’s drive from town.

“I’m a hugger at my facility—with patients I know who are depressed or just cried. And, really, a hug is probably safer than a handshake. But I no longer shake hands when people come in. We did just buy more Clorox wipes, and we’re washing off the counters and the chairs. I don’t like hand sanitizer because it’s so drying, but we have it in the lobby. I tried to buy more hand sanitizer here in Fort Gaines at the Dollar General, and they were already sold out. So I got some toilet paper instead.

“I started hearing about it last week from patients. People will say, ‘What do you think of it?’ When this seventy-five-year-old man came in with flu symptoms this morning, we went out and wiped everything up. He didn’t bring up COVID-19 as a possibility. We did the flu test and that’s what he had. People aren’t thinking they have it. They’re still kind of thinking it’s a ways off. We feel a little protected because it’s so rural here.

“The local Albany station were broadcasting the Phoebe Putney hospital news conference during their news tonight. Somebody told me they had seen on Facebook that black people are more likely to get it. I said that there are actually probably fewer black people that have it, so far, because travel costs a lot and that seems to be a major risk factor to this point—international travel. It’s mostly old rich white people that do that.

“Our state senator contacted me a few days ago and said, ‘Oh, should we give information to the black churches?’ Some handouts were sent from the health department to the pastors. The health department takes the lead on this sort of thing. I really didn’t agree with all of their advice. Just like I really don’t agree with the C.D.C. advice at this point. The C.D.C. guidelines are still just to test people over a certain age with some kind of risk. We need to be testing extensively to find the people who are not so sick, if we’re going to stop the transmission. And we don’t remotely have the number of test kits for that.

“Now, if you seriously thought somebody was seriously ill, short of breath, you’d send them on to the hospital, either forty miles away in Alabama or sixty miles away in Albany, for a ventilator or something. Of course, there aren’t enough ventilators in this country to deal with the demand if this really hits hard. And with our current testing limitations, most people are probably never going to be tested.

“It was on the news last night that the commercial testers—LabCorp and Quest—are now offering test kits. We called Quest this morning and ordered five. Supposed to be shipped tomorrow. The health department here doesn’t have kits. Up until this, you had to get permission from the health department to test. It’s such a rapidly evolving situation.

“I imagine there will be people with it within the next few weeks here. The problem is, if you’re diagnosing it, you would have been exposed to it. We don’t even have any masks at our clinic. We have no way to isolate people when they come in. They’re giving out the advice now that before you go to the E.R., you should just call your doctor and, if you’re not that sick, they’ll tell you to just stay home. Whether anybody will actually listen to that advice . . .

“If there’s someone comes in and is coughing all over me and they test positive, then I’m supposed to stay home for two weeks. I’d actually get my house cleaned up—which might be a good thing. But people here would have to go someplace else far off. We have an ambulance now—that’s gotten better—which someone could use if they’re real sick. And people have friends who drive them. But, if you’re coughing real bad, your friend may not want to drive you. That’s what happened to the guy in New Rochelle.

“I think people will be hysterical here with even a small outbreak. The school would certainly close. There was a very low-risk case in Valdosta—a student-teacher whose family had been in contact with a diagnosed case in South Georgia closed the school there today. And she had no risk, basically. People would be freaking out. I think they’d stay home. And the economics of not going to work are pretty significant around here.

“I had a friend say, ‘I’m going to Orlando this weekend, for my birthday.’ And everybody at the table kind of looked at her and said, ‘Whoa, you shouldn’t.’ It hadn’t occurred to her. So it’s really just kind of starting to strike home. We had voted at the school board to let kids go on a trip to Florida in the spring. One of the board members said, ‘We can’t approve this, because of the virus.’ So we left it open, if the virus is gone.