“In some cases, they would say things like: ‘I knew I was sick. I didn’t have to go and tell someone I was sick.’ Or another concern of: ‘Well, if it turns out I’m sick, I’m going to be told to do this and this that I don’t want to do.’”
Donald Kraybill, senior fellow emeritus at the Young Center, said the vaccination decisions among the Plain community are as diverse as the 550 Amish congregations in Pennsylvania, because that’s where the decisions are made.
“I know of some congregations where they had an onset of infections back in last summer and last fall, and many of them feel, well, they’re already immunized by the fact that they already had the virus,” he said.
Hospitals across the state saw their operating margins drop during the last fiscal year due, according to a recent report, a trend related to the challenges posed by the pandemic.
In Plain community newspapers, the obituaries for Amish and Old Order Mennonites rose during the pandemic, just as they did in other communities.
That s how Steven Nolt identified COVID-19 s impact on the Plain communities across Pennsylvania because, beyond that, there are no reliable methods for measuring how many people in those communities contracted the virus or received the vaccination. We don’t have data because Amish folks were, generally speaking, not interested in being tested, for a number of reasons, said Nolt, interim director of Elizabethtown College s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. In some cases, they would say things like: I knew I was sick. I didn’t have to go and tell someone I was sick. Or another concern of: Well, if it turns out I’m sick, I’m going to be told to do this and this that I don’t want to do.
Some Amish in PA believe herd immunity protects them from coronavirus ydr.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ydr.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.