“Lancaster County, Pennsylvania: thousands of Amish families lead lives largely separate from modern America. There was a whole different approach here in this community when coronavirus broke out than many other places. After a short shutdown last year, the Amish chose a unique path that led to Covid-19 tearing through at warp speed. Calvin Lapp, Amish Mennonite, says they weren’t denying coronavirus, they were facing it head on. ‘Working is more important than dying. To shut down and say that we can’t go to church, we can’t get together with family, we can’t see our old people in the hospital, we got to quit working? It’s going completely against everything that we believe.’ Steve Nolt, Mennonite scholar, says, ‘For the most part, yeah, by the middle of May, it’s sort of like back to a typical behavior again. I know of some cases in which Amish people refused to go to the hospital, even when they were very sick because if they went there, they wouldn’t be able to have visitors. And it was more important to be sick, even very sick at home and have the ability to have some people around you than to go to the hospital and be isolated.’ Last March, the Lancaster County Amish were reported to be the first community to achieve ‘herd immunity,’ meaning a large part of a population had been infected with Covid-19 and became immune. One thing’s clear: there’s no evidence of any more deaths among the Amish than in places that shut down tight— some claim there were fewer here. That’s without masking, staying at home, or another important measure. Nolt says, ‘I think it’s pretty clear that in percentage terms, relatively few got the vaccine. As for the economy side we made more money in the last year than we ever did. It was our best year ever.’”
“Amish Covid,” Full Measure, Oct. 10, 2021