As state media endlessly cycle Governor Kristi Noem’s claim that we’ve flattened the curve, new data show that, this week, we turned that statement into a falsehood:
South Dakota has a relatively few 3,800 cases, but with less than 1 million people, it’s in the country’s top 20 states for cases per 100,000 people.
“We’re watching (the virus) march further and further west to less populated states, and even less populated states are seeing a caseload,” Maureen Miller, infectious disease epidemiologist at Columbia University, told “New Day” Friday, without specifically referring to South Dakota. “So that is how the wave works. It’s going to bubble up in different places over time” [Jason Hanna, “These Are the States with Coronavirus Cases Rising the Most,” CNN, 2020.05.15].
After spending most of April with most bars and restaurants closed and new coronavirus cases popping up at one or two a day, the Aberdeen City Council’s reopening of the local economy has brought several days of new cases in the double digits:
The fourteen-day covid-19 trend in Brown County is still rising. Tell me again why Aberdonians are eating in restaurants?
Because they are ignorant. Because they don’t value science or facts. Because they don’t have good leadership on the local, state and national level. Because they are selfish. Because they don’t have common sense. Because they have bought into the Trump death cult. It’s pretty much all of these reasons.
In a way, they are lemmings. They just follow the crowd off the cliff. It’s a weird cult of death and ignorance that accepts Trump’s Kool-Aide as if it were a Jim Jones cocktail.
It would be fine with me if they commit suicide by COVID, if it didn’t endanger others as they were engaging in their self-destructive behavior. Just think, everyone of them could end up giving COVID to your daughter. That, to me, is a crime. It’s almost as if they can’t think beyond their own appetites, like a Donald Moeller, who finally got the death sentence he deserved.
Here’s a blast from the past: influenza cartoons. Enjoy.
https://thereformedbroker.com/2020/05/13/artwork-from-the-1918-pandemic/
Today’s new cases in Brown County: 21.
It is all the fault of testing for the virus. drumpf thinks if you don’t test, there would be very few cases at all…
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/15/21259888/trump-coronavirus-testing-very-few-cases
drumpf’s hoax just surpassed 89k deaths… deaths 89,133
The old subsidy queen riding high today more cases ee ehaha like she cares.About like the half dusty who would vote aginst workers pensions put those workers on welfare sorry excuse for a congress man.
I’d be curious to see if the rise in cases is related to an increase in testing. Nate Silver, who I wouldn’t call a MAGA man has tweeted out some comments around how major news media reports on the increase in positive tests, with no reference to how the increase is often driven by increased testing.
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1261657125975097344?s=20
It may be that it’s not the case in South Dakota, but I would be interested to see the #s.
Donald – some harsh words for people trying to do their best in a difficult leadership situation. I imagine you probably don’t know any of those individuals personally. What are concrete actions that you propose they do?
Those cartoons are outstanding John, thanks. They apparently had lying politicians then, though they’d have to try very hard to surpass our 21st century Liar-in-Chief.
Heartless Heathen is so paranoid about the economic situation that he’ll let as many of the little people die as it takes to protect his disreputable self. His cult members in red states are eager to do their part. It’s maddening and heartbreaking, both at once.
Corey, have you been tracking hospitalizations by day. It looks like hospitalizations are taking off in Brown County. Undoubtedly and sadly, that will mean deaths.
Queen NOem refuses to use the $125 BILLION for necessary covid19 needs for our citizens. That means not enough masks, tests, and personnel to administer those tests around the state. As long as she is not gonna use that money as congress intended, she should send it back to congress so they call allocate it to a state that will. It is our money after all.
If you check the Cumulative Case Tracker in South Dakota by the SD Department of Health, within the KELO COVID-19 site, you will notice the state is trying to make the curve look like it is flattening by comparing daily numbers to a potential 24,000 cases versus it previous graph which, until just recently, compared its daily case numbers to a 6,000 maximum.
You would think those who often cry, or are enablers to the those who often cry, “Fake News” would be the last to produce deceiving graphs with a fake flair.
There’s a lot of that fake numbers reporting going on in red states. Some of it is outright lying.
Why does “trying to do their best” insulate public officials from criticism when their best turns out to be choices that are ineffective or even counterproductive?
Why does Donald have to know public officials personally to make observations about the quality of their public policy decisions?
KJ, Donald is doing his best to make sense of public policy decisions. Do you know Donald personally?
John Kennedy, you will not find the chart you reference at SDDOH. The data was supplied by DOH but if you look at the credits supplied by KELO, Get the Data, and Created with Datawrapper, one can assume it was KELO that assigned the X and Y axis values not SDDOH.
Last updated: May 17, 2020, 11:38 GMT
United States
Coronavirus Cases:
1,507,798
Deaths:
90,113
Debbo, care to give references that support your claim?
It’s back….. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/16/uss-theodore-roosevelt-sailors-test-positive-coronavirus-261873
13 cases recurred after recovery.
Scott, I haven’t included hospitalizations on my chart. Do you have a reliable list? That statistic should be of primary concern: knowing we can’t make coronavirus disappear, we have to maintain a level of shutdown that keeps the cases from spreading too fast for our hospitals to handle.
Alarming info, Mike… although I want to read that story carefully. “This week, a small number of TR Sailors who previously tested COVID positive and met rigorous recovery criteria have retested positive,’ said Navy spokesperson Cmdr. Myers Vasquez.” That tells me they tested positive, showed strong signs of recovery, by tested positive again. That doesn’t mean they got it, beat it, then got it again; it could mean they had it and seemed to recover but still had coronavirus in their system that made a resurgence.
I live on the edge, Master, :)
I think uncertainty, lack of trust in information, and just plain human nature are the reasons why we’re seeing groups of people responding to this very differently. Some people are very cautious and will do whatever they are told might prevent getting sick or spreading sickness. Some people will go out of their way to actively try to get sick or spread sickness. Most people are somewhere in the middle. So of course some people will pack restaurants and beaches and do whatever else they’re impulses suggest.
Some of these people are stupid, but I think it’s an equal percentage to the percentage of stupid people in the general public. There are also lots of stupid people consistently staying home and then wearing masks when they absolutely have to go out. In all groups, some people are stupid.
I think subjective risk tolerance and the way we receive and interpret information about the sickness play huge roles, too. Some people are just more willing to risk their own lives and the lives of others, and I don’t just mean now. Well over a million people die every year in auto accidents. Almost 100,000 die of alcohol related causes each year in the US alone. About 1,000 unfortunate Americans will die this year while riding a bicycle. Now, I’m certainly not saying because other causes of death exist we shouldn’t try to minimize the damage of this pandemic. I’m just saying we all have a certain level of tolerance for the risk of death and our behaviors are as varied as our risk tolerance levels. It seems to be a cost-benefit analysis, and the disagreement among groups shouldn’t surprise anybody.
The amount of coverage this sickness has received, and the opposing positions taken by people who are supposed to be authorities across the country and around the world makes it even less surprising that people would just sort of wing it. First masks were going to make the problem worse, now they are a topic of division because peopleare being shamed for not wearing them. First the goal was to shutter society just to flatten the curve so our hospitals could keep up, but we knew it would infect the vast majority of us, it was just buying time. Now the most cautious seem to be saying everything should remain closed until this is completely eradicated, and we’ll all just live off borrowed Chinese money until then. The hospital-saving curve now is apparently unimportant, with most hospitals keeping up just fine. So I think people generally being suspicious of what they’re told and just going about their lives is expected, especially with both sides of our political system making this a partisan issue. People are so incredibly tribalistic in this country along party lines, of course many people will dig in to the position supported by their party mouthpieces.
It’s a crazy time, and people don’t handle stress well in large groups over periods of time. I’m honestly surprised mayhem has been kept at bay this long.
I think it’s rational and fair to have the conversation about what societal and economic costs are worth saving lives. We do this analysis all the time in many areas of life – Industry. Sport. Travel. Exploration. I don’t know the right balance of cost and benefit. Nobody does because it’s subjective. Subjective issues like this are the hardest to form consensus around.
TH, I appreciate the constructive criticism. I will also note, that KELO has returned the chart to a 3500 maximum.
Ryan’s thoughtful piece is interesting, but it neglects the issue of responsibility for increasing or decreasing risks. If I engage in activity that increases your risk and you have no control over my activities, I make your decision about risk much more difficult to calculate, ie., much less knowable. It’s not the known risk that causes hesitation. It’s the fact that you can’t calculate that risk.
One hears the statistic that half the people driving after midnight are legally drunk. I make it a habit to be home by 10 pm, giving myself a pretty good cushion against the risk of being in an accident caused by a drunken idiot. In rare instances when I’ve had to be out later than that, I am an extra-defensive driver.
Enforced regulations, like drunk driving laws, give folks much greater certainty about certain risks. I know that police are out on Midvale Boulevard looking for speeders and people under the influence. We have laws to put people in jail who increase my risk of dying in a car accident. Why not jail the idiots who go into bars, don’t wear masks, refuse to socially distance and pose a health risk to others?
We don’t sit around and calculate the costs and benefits of drunk driving, As a society, we’ve made the decision to protect human life from that risk. The whiners, of course, whined about loss of freedom and loss of economic activity at bars. They lost, not, however, before killing off people.
I’m sorry, people start to “wing it” and they’ll have me telling them what for. And I’m more than happy to shame them, if we can’t get government to do their goddam job.
Yes, flattening the curve was one goal. The other is to reduce the death rate until there is a vaccine. South Dakota hasn’t really done a good job of flattening the curve. I don’t know why it’s opening up.
Donald I hear what you are saying but all cars could easily have breathalyzers. A first DUI could mean revoked license forever. But those aren’t the case. Yes we make driving drink illegal, but young kids are risky legal drivers and we know it. All of this makes my point – society puts up with the risk of death all the time. Everyone will have a different line they don’t think is appropriate to cross, but we all willingly put ourselves in the path of death every day. And don’t misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting we remove all restrictions and just roll the dice. I’m just saying everyone has their own risk tolerance, so people behaving very differently during a pandemic is 100% par for the course.
Tim Higgins, are you asking me about states lying about their numbers? I don’t have links any more, but a week or so ago Florida announced that it wasn’t reporting some numbers. trump has consistently pressed for underreporting/lying about the number of cases and deaths. I think it would be foolish to believe that his devoted follower govs aren’t taking the hint.
Admittedly, none of that is with links so if you choose to believe every red state whose gov is devoted to Liar-in-Chief is reporting strictly accurate counts, well, I guess you can.
From the Atlantic….At least five states that don’t provide all covid death info.
But these rosy numbers may conceal a problem: A lack of federal guidelines has created huge variation in how states are reporting their COVID-19 data and in what kind of data they provide to the public.
These gaps can be used for political advantage. In at least one state, Virginia, senior officials are blending the results of two different types of coronavirus test in order to report a more favorable result to the public. This harms the integrity of the data they use to make decisions, reassure residents, and justify reopening their economy.
Other differences make it hard to track the pandemic. In at least three other states, officials have lumped together probable and confirmed COVID-19 deaths; most don’t specify how they’re counting deaths. While most states report the number of people who have been tested for the coronavirus, six states say they track the number of samples that have been tested—and California and New Jersey switched methods in the past few weeks. Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, and New York do not report the racial or ethnic breakdown of coronavirus cases.* Even more states fail to report the racial breakdown of deaths. It is still impossible to know, for example, how many black people have died of COVID-19, though the data that do exist suggest that black people are dying at much higher levels than other groups.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-publishing-covid-19-test-data/611764/
Major discrepancies between what the CDC tests claims are and what the states themselves self report on covid tests.
Ryan, I don’t disagree that people have their own risk tolerance. In this pandemic, I do the grocery shopping (senior hours with mask and gloves and sanitizer), while Liz processes the food that I, the great hunter, brings home. We had a discussion about this division of labor, and why she was freaking out about going into the store. I explained that I think males, in general, are less risk averse. We have hormones that make us crazy. We die doing dumb things all the time, but we also brought home the meat. There’s a lot of evolutionary theory, involving the expendability of males, about why this is.
I also know that in my life my risk tolerance has fluctuated with age with the biggest drop in risk taking occurring when I had a child. I realized then that I was in this life for something much more important than myself, and that it mattered to someone else how much risk I took. Males, it turns out, are expendable only if they aren’t needed for offspring survival. It made me look at risk differently than simple economic cost/benefit approaches, which is a particularly limiting way to approach risk. If you tie risk calculations only to dollars, you are missing the most important aspects of life, including the well-being of loved ones and the community. That’s when you start thinking much more broadly about risks, costs and benefits.
In my finances I take risks with investments, but I guard against large downside risk. I’m not a buy and hold type person. I’ll get out of the market on 7 percent drops, guarding against the big drops, and take the risk of not getting back in to hit the bounce back. That’s how I approach this pandemic, except the stakes are much higher. Downside costs in this pandemic is death to loved ones and myself. That’s not a risk I care to take if it can be avoided or greatly lessened by various personal behavior and social/governmental policy.
Preaching to the choir, Donald. I wear my n95 into hyvee because I have a 4 year old at home, and a wife who is 7 months pregnant who also happens to be a nurse, even though I feel absolutely ridiculous wearing it. We are certainly more careful than we would have been before we had kids. But this is just us, and you, and whoever else happens to be concerned about this sickness. The type of people who read and comment on this blog obviously leans toward middle age democrats, so readers here are probably very likely to take this virus serious and do what cnn says they should do, but it’s important to keep in mind despite Democrats thinking they’re constantly preventing the Republicans from destroying the world, at least half of the country disagrees. Democrats might say the economy isn’t worth killing people…then Republicans would say hey you Democrats want abortion to be readily available everywhere, so your concern for life is suspicious…then Democrats would say you Republicans only care about life until its born, then you let people in need suffer and die…then Republicans would say of course we value life we just dont think everything can be free…and then Democrats would blah blah blah.
Both sides think they are obviously right and the other side is living in another dimension. It’s crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it. Sometimes it’s easy to use common sense on an issue and point out who’s being ridiculous, but the fact is this pandemic is unprecedented in modern times. Both sides have valid points, and neither side is really open to compromise or constructive conversation. They just want to be praised for being right and for pointing out how wrong the other guys are. We deserve this, frankly.
Excellent link mfi, after reading that great answer to Mr. Higgins question, I came across this headline “There’s One Big Reason the U.S. Economy Can’t Reopen
The country faces the same problem today that it did two months ago: There are not enough tests to contain the virus.” https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/theres-only-one-way-out-of-this-mess/611431/
Queen NOem should either buy reliable test kits and other needed Covid19 medical PPE. or she should send that $1.25 BILLION Dollars back to Washington so the congress can give it to a state that is serious about opening their economy.
Cory, Thought you might be interested….Dr. Jim Buchanan of Rapid City has been tracking Covid-19 metrics in the state since the first case. He updates his spreadsheet daily. His Twitter feed also includes graphs and commentary.
https://twitter.com/jimbuctwit/status/1262070267322515457/photo/1
It really is all China’s fault. Here’s the latest zany conspiracy theory in trumpland:
is.gd/b7OKzZ
(Notice that the overriding qualification for a member of the deministration is not patriotism, knowledge of the US Constitution, experience, wisdom, education or any of a dozen other relevant things. Nope. It’s loyalty to Imbecilic Idiot.)
Old Peter got into the bosses Adderall again.
Debbo
Yeah it’s only the blue states that are lying about their numbers. Here is an actual link about Covid falsehoods, but hey believe what you want.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/san-diego-official-reveals-only-six-of-countys-194-covid-deaths-are-pure-solely-coronavirus-deaths
Sorry for the error of my post, got the colors mixed up, should have proofread when given the opportunity
So you found a single conservative pol who spews the drumpf garbage only those with no underlying health concerns who die from covid should be counted.
This assclown seems to think people with underlying health risks aren’t worth protecting, just typical drumpf-think.
I get it, We saw this in Iraq. American soldiers with severe head trauma from rocket attacks only had headaches according to esteemed Dr drumpf. No worries.
Higgins is a Glenn Beck guy, who would’ve thunk it. Uh..buy gold!! From him!!
Corey, when Aberdeen opened up, there were 3 hospitalization in brown county. Late last week numbers started climbing. Up to 10 today.
Curious: what is our total hospital capacity? Are all ten of those patients staying in Aberdeen, or are we shipping them out to Sioux Falls?
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-18/georgia-coronavirus-numbers-reopening-manipulated-data-brian-kemp
Georgia’s unbelievable stats used to push for re-opening the state truly were unbelievable and likely, purposely manipulated to make them look positive, according to LA Tines.
drumpf body count hits another milestone today….
Deaths:
109,127
Not only are blacks suffering disproportionately from covid-19, here comes 20% unemployment which hits blacks harder than the rest of working class, according to Politico Newsletter….
20 PERCENT UNEMPLOYMENT? — As protests continue throughout the country over police brutality toward black Americans, it’s worth remembering that we’re still in the middle of a severe recession. The monthly jobs numbers for May, which will be released Friday, are expected to show we’ve reached 20 percent unemployment, and that’s falling particularly hard on minorities. Fewer than half of black adults are now employed, according to Labor Department data.
drumpf recently bragged about doing more for blacks than any potus except Lincoln. I believe he was holding an alleged bible at the time and his hands didn’t drop off. I can’t speak for anyone but me, and I am not black, but I don’t think blacks will thank drumpf for this kind of help.
“Fewer than half of black adults are now employed.”
Wow. That’s just stunning. What a pitiful excuse for a president.
drumpf body count today, another 1000 hapless victims who won’t enjoy fireworks with the Russian bot in the kremlin annex.
Deaths:
116,024