‘It’s Gone Haywire:’ When COVID-19 Arrived In Rural Georgia

A man riding a bicycle down an empty street last month wears a protective mask amid the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in Dawson, Georgia. In the impoverished southwest corner of Georgia the virus quietly climbed to having some of the country’s worst per capita death rates from COVID-19.  

Brynn Anderson / Associated Press

The reverend approached the makeshift pulpit and asked the Lord to help him make some sense of the scene before him: two caskets, side by side, in a small-town cemetery busier now than ever before.

Rev. Willard O. Weston had already eulogized other neighbors lost to COVID-19, and he would do more. But this one stood as a symbol to him of all they had lost. The pair of caskets, one powder blue, one white and gold, contained a couple married 30 years who died two days apart, at separate hospitals hours from each other, unaware of the other’s fate.

The day was dark. There was no wind, not even a breeze. It felt to some like the earth had paused for this.