Heading For The Hills To Escape COVID-19 May Put You Out of Hospital’s Reach

The criteria for evaluating a second home typically involve a mix of culture, get-away-from-it-all outdoor activities and water – liquid or flakey. We typically look for places that juxtapose our urban lifestyle to facilitate an unwinding.

That’s gone.

When evaluating a second home purchase, act like a retiree. People seeking a primary residence in retirement want all the culture and ocean views a younger second homeowner wants. But there are additional dimensions to the purchase. For example, don’t assume you’ll be driving forever. Understand how different states tax retirement income. Research the proximity to and the capabilities of local healthcare. And for those looking for a place in the boonies, that gets harder by the day.

As COVID-19 has spread, so have people to their second homes. Trying to escape sickness, they run away to their hideaways hoping to outfox fate. The problem is that in addition to spreading disease, they’re heading into locales poorly equipped to handle an outbreak.

Texas Rural Hospitals Rapidly Closing

The results for these escapees are bucolic settings miles, and often hours, away from proper medical care. In February 2020, The Chartis Center for Rural Health reported that Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee led the way in rural hospital closures with Texas closing 20 rural hospitals since 2010.

Their report said, “Of the eight states with the highest levels of closures since 2010, none are Medicaid expansion states.” [Emphasis mine]

The report further identifies 453 vulnerable rural hospitals nationwide, a list 51 percent of Texas’ 152 remaining rural hospitals are on – 27 percent listed as “most vulnerable.” The national average is for 21 percent of a state’s rural hospitals to be tagged “vulnerable” with 10 percent being “most vulnerable.”

So in addition to removing healthcare for an area’s full-time residents, second homeowners in many states, but especially Texas, are entering healthcare-free zones they may know nothing about.

Ill Equipped for Serious Illness

In addition to the complete vanishing of local hospitals, those hospitals that remain are not sized, staffed or supplied for pandemic response for their full-time residents – let alone a ballooning of part-time residents who may also have brought disease from their urban homes.

Resort towns are among the heaviest hit. The Guardian reports that Sun Valley, Idaho, had 351 confirmed coronavirus cases as of last Thursday for a population of 22,000 residents and is in the county reporting half of Idaho’s total cases. Vail, Colorado, Park City, Utah, and Palm Beach all report significant per capita infection rates – roughly four times that of rural counties that don’t attract vacationers and on par with some of the hardest-hit cities.

Many mayors of these resort towns are begging part-timers to stay away. Even close-in places like New Hampshire, Nantucket, and the Hamptons are angered by New Yorkers escaping the city and bringing COVID-19 with them. Everyone from millionaires to social media influencers are catching heat. Less glamorous, last week Catherine Calderwood, Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer, resigned after she was caught leaving her Edinburgh home for her vacation home 45 miles away during a stay-at-home order.

The New Prepper

Preppers used to be weirdos who built concrete tombs with bunkbeds and walls of canned goods. Then the one percent got into the groove. In 2017, The New Yorker wrote about the phenomenon of the billionaires purchasing spreads in New Zealand to ride out any apocalypse (that they likely had a hand in causing).

One interesting question the article put forth was whether the billionaire preppers who planned to fly their private jets to safety were pilots. That’s because unless these silver-spoon preppers took their pilot’s family along for the ride, they’d probably never get off the ground.

In a Pandemic, It’s Not Pilots

Two weekends ago, the Dallas Morning News posted a story targeting wealthy folks to purchase huge ranches in the sticks costing between $7 million and $26 million. Aside from being spectacularly tone-deaf, one wonders if these would-be pandemic escapees are doctors themselves?  Will they be constructing their own clinic on-site? If they’re not doctors, who would they expect to staff it? And what about those careworkers’ families? And if the worst comes and local resources are overwhelmed, do they just pull up the drawbridge and let the world die?

Hey, I’m all about second homes (I have one). But the game has changed – at least for a while (never underestimate our ability to forget). Regardless of the type of second home you desire, there’s a new level of responsibility to consider – for your health and the health of the poor sods who have to live nearby.

Smart retirees have known for a long time that the beach may be gorgeous and the golf great, but if there isn’t adequate healthcare nearby, it’s a no-go.

Overall, not bad advice on any home.