The Amish are a Christian group that emphasizes the virtuous over the superficial. They don’t usually drive, and don’t routinely use electricity or have TVs. And during the Covid-19 outbreak, they became subjects in a massive social and medical experiment.
After a brief shutdown in the beginning, the Amish chose a different path that led to Covid tearing through the community at warp speed. It began with an important religious holiday in May of 2020.
“When they take communion, they dump their wine into a cup, and they take turns to drink out of that cup,” Calvin Lapp explained to me. He’s an Amish Mennonite living in the largest Amish community in the US centered in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
“So, you go the whole way down the line, and everybody drinks out of that cup. If one person has coronavirus, the rest of the church is going to get coronavirus. The first time they went back to church, everybody got coronavirus.”
Lapp says the Amish weren’t denying Covid. They were facing it head-on. “It’s a worse thing to quit working than dying. Working is more important than dying,” he says. “But 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. You’re changing our culture completely to try to act like they wanted us to act the last year, and we’re not going to do it.”
That also meant avoiding hospitals. The Amish simply refused to go to the hospital, even when they were very sick, because that would mean they couldn’t see visitors. And, to them, they’d rather be very sick at home with people around them than be isolated in a hospital.
The Amish anecdotes were powerful, but solid proof wasn’t easy to find because the Amish didn’t typically take Covid tests. Their thinking, says one observer, was, “I’m sick. I know I’m sick. I don’t have to have someone else telling me I’m sick.”
Hellbound and Down 