The Coronavirus Turned a Rural County Into a Battleground for Millionaires
Joni Reynolds often wonders how things in Gunnison County got so out of hand. How did she, the top health official of a sparsely populated county deep in the Rocky Mountains, end up the target of national fury, and frightened enough to sleep with a gun on her nightstand?
Joni and her husband, Dennis, moved to Gunnison in 2015 to be closer to nature: the smooth waters of the Blue Mesa Reservoir; the craggy, snow-capped peaks of the Rockies; and the yellow aspens dotting the landscape in autumn. The 61-year-old registered nurse is thoughtful and self-effacing in conversation, the habit of a woman who knows her facts but is perhaps used to being spoken over. Reynolds had worked for years in a high-powered Denver job at the Colorado Department of Public Health, but she got tired of the bureaucracy, and sick of feeling so disconnected from the community. In her adopted mountain home, she could spend more time talking with people. During the week, she helped integrate the different sections of her new county health office; on Saturdays and Sundays, she went boating with Dennis and learned how to hunt elk. In decades past, Gunnison’s people had been ranchers and tradesmen, mostly, a mix of Blue Dog Democrats and moderate Republicans. But by the time the Reynoldses moved to the area, tourism had exploded, and the county’s quaint little towns had been settled by wealthy California liberals and Wall Street financiers who day-trade from their log-cabin estates and hit the slopes on the weekends. Other rich people, many of whom live in Texas and Oklahoma, buy second homes in the county for easy access to its wonders. For the first five years they lived there, Joni and Dennis enjoyed those wonders too.
Then the pandemic hit. Three days after the county confirmed its first positive case, Reynolds banned large gatherings, and a few days later, she limited nearly all in-person activity at local businesses. In Colorado, county public-health directors have the power to issue orders unilaterally in a crisis, and COVID-19 was certainly a crisis. Gunnison County soon had one of the highest per-capita rates of infection in. The decision had not been hard to make. Reynolds was responsible for the health of the county’s full-time residents, and temporarily banning the out-of-state millionaires seemed an easy way to limit community spread.
