The coronavirus “tore through this valley like a wildfire,” said Brent Russell, one of the emergency room doctors.
The snow-capped peaks of Idaho’s Wood River Valley are a magnet for movie stars and other wealthy tourists who throng to the area each winter bearing their skis, their appetites and their cash. They come for the soft powder, stay for the parties at top-class restaurants and pump money into an otherwise remote wilderness region where the howl of wolves echoes through the night.
But this year, somewhere between the lifts and the lodge, the tourists left behind something else: a deadly virus.