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(Journalist)
– It took less than a year for COVID-19 to spread to each of America’s more than 3,000 counties. The last county to register an infection was Kalawao County in Hawaii, the smallest and least populated in the country, where quarantine was a way of life for more than a century, the the Wall Street newspaper reports. The county is located on the Kaluapapa Peninsula on the island of Moloka’i. Steep cliffs cut it off from the rest of the island and the only land access is via a mule track. People with leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease, were exiled there from 1866 to 1969 and the approximately 70 current residents include a dozen patients with Hansen’s disease, an average of 86 years old, report it Washington post.
Health officials in Hawaii say the county’s first coronavirus case was reported in December, weeks after a case was finally reported in Loving County, Texas, population 169. A resident who had been tested negative in Honolulu tested positive after flying back to the county. Officials say the virus has not spread in the community because the person and others on the flight quarantined themselves after arriving. “To me that person was a hero, because they were honest, and they reported it, and they followed the quarantine rules when they came back from outside the colony,” Glenn Wasserman said. , division chief of communicable diseases and public health nursing at the Hawaii Department of Health, recounts the Newspaper. (Read more stories about COVID-19.)
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