COVID-19 Has Hit The Amish Community Hard. Still, Vaccines Are A Tough Sell

Michie

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The Amish communities of northeast Ohio engage in textbook communal living. Families eat, work and go to church together, and through the pandemic, mask-wearing and social distancing have been spotty. As a result, these communities have experienced some of the state's highest rates of infection and deaths.

Nevertheless, health officials are struggling to get residents vaccinated. Holmes County, where half of the population is Amish, has the lowest vaccination rate in Ohio, with just 10% of its roughly 44,000 residents fully vaccinated.

Less than 1% of Amish have received any doses of vaccine, according to Michael Derr, the county's health commissioner.

In an effort to increase that number, health officials are holding vaccination clinics in rural areas. They've also reached out to bishops and community leaders to spread the word about the safety of the vaccines. Still, few Amish residents are showing up to the health department's clinics.

Marcus Yoder, who lives in Holmes County, was born Amish and is now Mennonite and still has close ties to the Amish community. He says the few Amish who are getting vaccinated are doing so privately through doctors' offices and small rural clinics – and they are keeping it to themselves.

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COVID-19 Has Hit The Amish Community Hard. Still, Vaccines Are A Tough Sell
 

Wolseley

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There is a large Amish/Mennonite community close to where I live; they have a small food store that we go to for things that you literally can't find anywhere else in this day and age. Never once, during the whole course of this pandemic, did I walk in there and see any of the staff wearing masks. The customers mostly did, but not the staff themselves.
 
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Wolseley

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According to that map, there are counties in Ohio with almost double the infection rate of Holmes County, yet which are not known for high Amish population.

Amazing, isn't it? It's sort of like this:


lunacy.jpg
 
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honestal

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My wife and I live in the VERY northeast tip of Ohio-- five minutes from PA and five minutes from Lake Erie.

We have a pretty big Amish community near us and we know many of them because of our health business. Also, we're particularly close to three Amish families (father and two married sons) that have done a lot of carpentry work for two of our children that live in the area. Whenever they do work for my kids I usually drive them to and from the job. (They did some work for my son just last week.) I've asked them about Covid among them. They said there's been hardly any.

They're very old order Amish and very communal.

The father and two sons that I haul around pretty much think the whole Covid thing is a big government scam. They hate the mask mandate. (As do I.)
 
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