A deepening demographic crisis now haunts rural Georgia and offers one of the starkest pictures of the widening divide between the greater Atlanta area and the rest of the state. In less than 20 years, based on data maintained by the state’s Department of Public Health (DPH), the number of Georgia counties reporting more deaths than births exploded from less than 20 to nearly 100 of the state’s 159 counties.
In fact, the number of counties reporting more deaths than births peaked at 124 in 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 spike, and the combined 130 counties outside the 29-county Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) posted nearly 10,000 more deaths than births during the three-year Covid period from 2020 through 2022.
The Georgia situation is, of course, part of a larger national trend that started around 2010 and at least coincided with the Great Recession. A February 2022 paper by Kenneth Johnson at the University of New Hampshire reported that, for the first time ever, rural America lost population between 2010 and 2020. “The loss was minimal,” he wrote, “just 289,000 (-0.6 percent) out of 46 million, but it is the first decade-long rural population loss in history.”…