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by usefulcat 2292 days ago
People can be transported from rural areas to urban hospitals..
2 comments

The next question is, will they. I know of a town in Indiana where a surprising number of people don't get medical help. Some of it is money, but a big part is cultural. Indianapolis scares them. I dare say, for too many Indianapolis is scarier than COVID-19.
Depends on the disease.

Something like a stroke requires immediate action (say, within 2 hours) to be able to use the best treatments available. Living very far away from a good hospital makes your survival chances quite lower.

For Covid-19, as far as I read, some people have gone to the hospital (already having trouble to breath) and died after a few hours. But those seem extreme cases. Normally you would have a couple days to go to the hospital from the moment you realize something is odd.

Life flights put most rural places in the US within those time bounds.
Yes, but those bounds are not binary. The faster you arrive, the higher the chance survival (specially for things like strokes, arriving in 30 minutes is way better than in 2 hours).

Then there is the issue of cost for that flight and the poor state of healthcare.