Kristi Noem of South Dakota, more than any other state governor, has made a personal brand out of her refusal to implement public health measures to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is a quick timeline of her insistence on "personal freedom," which is the death cultists' byword on why they won't protect themselves or anyone else.
In mid April the United States was reaching an early peak of 30,000 new coronavirus cases each day. (I say "early peak" because new daily diagnoses subsequently declined. We are now seeing about 200,000 new diagnoses each day.) Things here in New York were especially bad: we get a lot of travelers from around the country and world, we live really close together, and doctors had figured out very little about treating severe cases. The entire country was losing about 2,000 people every day. About half of them were here in New York! In South Dakota at that time, though, nobody was dying on an average day and they were diagnosing about 125 cases daily.
Perhaps as important, President Donald Trump had been downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic since early February. In fact, he said it would be over by April with the advent of warm weather. When various states began ordering schools and businesses to close, Trump jabbered about reopening by Easter, which was April 12 this year. He also absolutely refused to mask in public. On April 15 he was still pressuring the states to end the school and business closings. What did Governor Noem have to say? "I believe in our freedoms." She implemented no mandatory public health measures: no closures, no mask mandates.
In May, Governor Noem decided it was a good idea to demand that the Oglala and Cheyenne River Lakota take down the highway checkpoints they were using to try and reduce the spread of coronavirus on their reservations. She made a public show of issuing a 48-hour order to stop checking traffic and insuring that outsiders keep going. Cheyenne River Tribal Chairman Harold Frazier declined to take them down and wrote her to ask her if there had actually been any complaints by motorists. Oglala Sioux Tribal President Julian Bear Runner pointed out that the checkpoints wouldn't be necessary if she had implemented any kind of shut downs. In the end, she never actually took the tribes to court at all.
In June, Governor Noem was still talking about "freedom." She said that more freedom is the answer. While her talking points had previously included a reliance on science and data, on June 8 she warned against "blind reliance on insufficient modeling"!? By that time the worst of the initial stage of the pandemic in New York was past. The 7-day average showed that we were still losing seventy friends, neighbors, and relatives each day. But that was a dramatic improvement over the thousand a day in April. Nationally, the death toll passed 110,000 and President Trump was still promising that the virus was "going away."
But the July 4th holiday was coming. Trump was not only promising that it was going to go away, but claiming that if it weren't for "fake news" everybody would know that it already was. And he was itching to start up those rallies that feed his ego so much. The first rally since March was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 20. His staff ran around the arena removing the "Don't Sit Here" stickers that the venue had put on seats at the request of the local government in order to create social distance. Most of the people who attended followed the President's lead by refusing to mask. In his immediate entourage, both Herman Cain, the former Republican presidential candidate, and Kimberley Guilfoyle, the Fox News personality (and Trump's son's girlfriend) apparently contracted COVID at the rally. Cain subsequently passed away from the illness. Coronavirus rates in the Tulsa area tripled in the weeks after.
So starting the in-person rallies back up was a big opportunity for Governor Noem to demonstrate her loyalty to the President and his fans. She wanted Trump to appear at Mt. Rushmore for an Independence Day fireworks show. In interviews she acknowledged that when she first brought it up he told her how much he loved Mt. Rushmore and wondered aloud how he could get his face on it. When she realized that he wasn't kidding she had artists make a model that included him alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. By July 4th, New York's closures and mask regulations had further pushed deaths down to 25 a day. The country as a whole was still climbing to new peak of 70,000 cases a day, but South Dakota was only contributing 50 of them. And the average daily death rate there was still zero.
Sturgis was coming. If you have no connection with American motorcycle culture you may not know about the annual bikers gathering in the Black Hills during the first week of August. It has been going on since the late 1930's and every summer for the last few decades roughly half a million motorcyclists descend on the town of 6,000 for drinking, touring, racing, parading, and other revelry. Some people in town really didn't see how bringing in people from other places could possibly be a good idea during a pandemic. The local businesses who profit from the rally clearly thought the lucrative benefits outweighed any health risks. Governor Noem loudly supported them and it turns out that lots of regular attendees agreed with her about freedom, COVID, Trump, and social distancing. Close to 500,000 riders showed up. South Dakota was by then averaging 80 new cases of coronavirus a day and had inched up to a daily average of 2 deaths. I have no idea if any riders hurt each other during the bacchanalia (I can guess) but I do know that one woman was knocked unconscious and stripped of her jeans by a buffalo when she got too close to a calf. I am not making this up.
But COVID wasn't going to make a grand entrance during the week of the rally. The incubation period of the virus (and the lag before serious symptoms) guarantees that. Everybody got to convince themselves that they were right to be unafraid... at least for a few weeks. By September 8, Fox News was reporting that - of the 1.4 million cases during August - 20% were a direct result of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally! New York State was by now down to ten deaths a day. South Dakota was averaging 236 new daily cases (up almost 300% from a month before) but zero deaths. And Governor Kristi Noem loudly denounced the Fox News story as "fiction."
In retrospect it should be obvious where this is going. Phrases like "tempting fate" come to the tongue. But the coming trajectory was clear to epidemiologists months before. By late October South Dakota had become a center for the nation's explosive growth. The state was experiencing 731 new cases a day and averaging six deaths. By comparison, New York, with a population 22 times larger was down twenty daily deaths. Another way of looking at this is to note that twice as many people live in the 34 square miles of Manhattan as in the 77,000 square miles of South Dakota. This is significant because it highlights the difficulty of social distancing in New York. It highlights the extreme ease a virus finds in spreading among a population of 48,000 per square mile as compared to a population of 11 per square mile. But we had just reopened our schools on split schedules to keep numbers down. Broadway was still shuttered and we were still requiring people to wear masks. Governor Noem hadn't budged in her opposition.
On October 20 she boldly claimed "We follow the science" while scientists and physicians begged her to implement mandatory public health measures. In vain. She boasted of South Dakota's total death rate (yes, she did) of only 37 per 100,000 making invidious comparison with New York's 171 per 100,000. She was comparing her state, which was still experiencing its first wave in the fall, with the state that had born the brunt of the pandemic back in the spring, when the disease was poorly understood and doctors in our hospitals were effectively practicing evidence-free medicine, trying to make up treatments while the ERs (and morgues!) were overflowing. Either she didn't know or she didn't care.
Do I feel good about the fact that the South Dakota death rate she boasted about just a month ago is now 84 per 100,000? I do not. But that is a 227% increase during a time when New York only suffered a 2% increase. We are indeed suffering here. We are back up to averaging 30 deaths a day here. But so is South Dakota, and that is in a population 4% our size, smaller than the Bronx. And what does she say? She says she won't mandate masks just "to make people feel good." Just to make people feel good? How about to keep people alive.
I only want to make a few more points. One is about narcissism. When President Trump was asked in mid-September if he was afraid of getting coronavirus at his rallies he answered, “I’m on a stage, it’s very far away, so I’m not at all concerned.” As everybody knows he was helicoptered to Walter Reed Hospital for treatment only two weeks later. He repeatedly stated that the US was "rounding a corner" at precisely the moment that the national case numbers began climbing again after a late summer drop. In the weeks before his electoral defeat in early November he kept complaining that the press was only reporting on this calamity to make him look bad. "You won't hear a word about it after the election." That is untrue because every day is worse than the day before now. We are now averaging 200,000 new cases and 2,000 deaths every day: a 67% increase over two weeks ago in both categories. Trump is used to bullshitting his way out of personal problems. He clearly believes that a global pandemic is only a problem because it makes him look bad. He has not shown an ounce of empathy for the sick, for the dying, or for the mourners. And Governor Kristi Noem has shown no leadership in public health, just a desire to look as tough as the fake tough guy in the White House so that she can be considered for her party's nomination in four years.
Second, I want to stop and remember that - for all the low numbers South Dakota reported in the late spring and summer - one of the largest early COVID outbreaks in the entire country was at Smithfield Foods in Sioux Falls. 1098 workers at their pork processing plant were diagnosed with coronavirus in April! Why didn't that set off alarm bells? I have to wonder if it wasn't because most of those workers were members of what the company referred to as the plant's "large immigrant population." That company spokesperson said, “Living circumstances in certain cultures are different than they are with your traditional American family.” We have already alluded to Noem's colonial approach to the original people of South Dakota. I suggest that she has the same attitude toward the newest arrivals.
Finally I need to say why I take the time to air my irritation toward the governor of one of America's least populous states. South Dakota has only one Representative, but the same two Senators as California or Texas or Florida or New York. They have an outsized influence on the Senate, which has stonewalled progress in any area of governance since the election of Barack Obama awakened the nightmares of the white supremacists. And what I wrote above about her being her party's nominee in 2024? It's a real possibility. I don't want to forget one detail of her irresponsibility if and when that happens
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