Todd Epp gets hold of some good coronavirus news from Becker’s Hospital Review, which reports Rt.Live data showing South Dakotans are the second-slowest spreaders of coronavirus in the country.
Well, that was Friday; according to the Rt dashboard‘s latest update as of Saturday, July 25, 10:25, we’ve held steady but Oregon has tapped the brakes further on the spread of coronavirus to take over our second-place spot and move us to third.
Rt tells the average number of people an infected person will infect. The threshold for beating an infectious disease is Rt = 1.0: if each infected person infects less than one person (or, put another way, if 100 sick people will only infect 80 other people), the pandemic will die out; if each infected person infects more than one other person, the pandemic will grow and we will die out.
South Dakota’s Rt of 0.93 is actually higher than it was when I reported on this contagion metric three months ago. Toward the end of April, South Dakota’s Rt was 0.80. More alarmingly, at the end of April, only six states had Rt greater than or equal to 1.0; every other state was on track to rein in coronavirus. Now toward the end of July, 41 states and the District of Columbia have Rt at or above 1.0, including every one of our neighboring states. I guess it was easier to stay home in spring than in this wonderful sunny summer… but really, people? You can’t go outside and keep your distance?
Benchmark Data Labs—the new branding of the Black Hills Knowledge Network—offers a useful graph showing what Rt = 0.93 looks like. Benchmark’s South Dakota coronavirus dashboard allows us to switch from the increasingly useless total cases count and instead see the trajectory of daily new cases:
Since our spring spikes, South Dakota has spent the two summer months averaging around 60 new cases per day. According to the state’s own data, over the last couple weeks, our new cases statewide have been trending upward:
…meaning our Rt could be trending up, and we should be doing more, like staying home and masking up, to bring that trend back down before school starts.
grudznick blogged about this some days back, when I was mocking you fellows for suggesting South Dakota was behaving irresponsibly. I am glad you and Mr. Epp are noticing. South Dakota is the bastion of freedom and good behavior. That was the subject of today’s opening rant at the Conservatives with Common Sense breakfast.
Mr. H is right; it is a nice day out there so get outside but don’t congregate into mosh pits and bar patios where you young people spread the covid bugs.
John Hopkins University tracking is a little less optimistic…
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/testing-positivity
Garbage in, garbage out.
Grdz. As usual. Completely malicious misleader. Troll
4th of July gatherings are starting to show up, would be my guess.
For several days after the 4th suicide mission, the Rapid City Journal was writing that there were still no increases in the Covid for Pennington County…they don’t do that anymore.
The big rodeo in Belle Fourche over the 4th should start to bring the covid into light as well. To bad there was no warnings about the dangers.