I would much rather be sowing confidence in my state government’s ability to keep us safe during a pandemic. However, the evidence is mounting that the Noem Administration is not taking coronavirus or our children’s safety seriously. I reported over a week ago that Aberdeen school staff are apparently having to pick up the slack as the Department of Health fails to send timely notifications of close contact with positive coronavirus cases. I noted yesterday that the superintendent of the Meade school district can’t get confirmation that DOH is closing the contact-tracing loop for its students. Now KELO-TV’s Dan Santella finds a Vermillion parent who got her daughter’s close-contact notice from DOH after the recommended 14-day quarantine period expired:
Jenica Ulibarri’s daughter attends Vermillion High School, and Ulibarri says that on September 4 she got word from the Vermillion School District that her daughter was a close contact of a person who tested positive.
…Ulibarri later received a letter which says that her daughter was a close contact, and that her daughter was put on a 14-day quarantine, with the quarantine ending on September 15. However, the letter is postmarked September 16, and it was received on September 18. If her daughter had started the quarantine when the letter told her to do so, she would have started it on September 1.
“My reaction to that letter is utter disappointment in our state’s leadership,” Ulibarri said [Dan Santella, “Vermillion Parent Shares Concern over Contact Tracing,” KELO-TV, 2020.09.21].
The simple solution here is to spend what’s left of our $1.25 billion in CARES Act coronavirus relief money to hire some of the 22,000 unemployed South Dakotans (and maybe some of the thousands who’ve dropped out of the workforce since the pandemic hit), train them fast, and have them help with contact tracing and notifications. And maybe while she’s flying back from her campaign events in Iowa, Michigan, and New Hampshire, Governor Kristi Noem herself could pick up a few of the names from DOH, split the list with her campaign advisor Corey Lewandowski, and make some contact tracing calls from their private jet. As Dr. Hurd says, pandemic response requires all hands on deck.
Simply put, we need to demand better. Accepting the corrupted system we have in South Dakota only breeds more corruption and failure. We can see that in our legislature, our schools, law enforcement (for us, the common folk) and on we go. As long as we put incompetent school boards and the like to run the system, all we can expect is failure and corruption. Demand better with better people to administer.
The incompetence of South Dakota state government has turned deadly. There has been obvious episodes of such incompetence for years. You don’t have repeated scandals from the sewage ash fiasco in the mid 1980s down to botched coronovirus response today without poor leadership that is not up to governance in the modern world.
Jerry and Donald, I have a similar conclusion, but a slightly different perspective. SD has starved service agencies and regulators to the point where there is just not the funding to do a robust job. DOE, DOH, and so many more are staffed and supplied with such a minimum that accomplishing things becomes impossible. That is the problem I have when leaders have no real ambitious vision, and instead are only concerned with keeping spending (taxes) under control. There comes a time when there is need for the critical work of those agencies and they just do not have the ability, the resources, to perform those necessary tasks.
Nobody wants to live in (much less pay for) the socialist state . . . until they need the help.
The point o makes has some validity. More brains and hands on the job helps, though only if the the leaders can administer effectively.
The sewage ash scam happened in spite of state regulators thinking they weren’t getting the truth from the scammers They asked me to petition for a contested case hearing. That’s how desperate they were to slow this thing down and stop it. There are (or were) good folks at the agencies, but they get overruled by bad leadership.
Yep!! Our taxes are low; but we don’t get much for ‘em.
Buckobear, I have some pals in Colorado that pay a whole lot less for their property tax and for a whole lot more than I do. Rent costs here are as high or higher than in Colorado too. No, we get nothing for something here.
Covid (drumpf body count) waits for no man…
United States
Coronavirus Cases:
7,095,757
Deaths:
205,394
I suspect Noem saw the new cases dropping and believed Trump’s story on kids not being a covid concern. Furthermore Noem likes to be a showoff so I’m guessing she was hoping to show off and tell the world she new covid was not going to be a problem and didn’t waste money on hiring or training contract tracers.
Just my guess of what happened.
Funding tourism instead of contract tracing. Meth, we’re on it.
Noem is not taking the corona virus danger seriously? Ya think? As reported in a glowing booster article in Rapid City Journal yesterday, Noem is dropping down serious taxpayer money, not on badly needed testing, but on an advertising campaign to reach out to businesses and organizations to come to have their conventions here in South Dakota, rather than in those states that impose silly safety restrictions on large indoor gatherings. She is actually using her administration’s refusal to take any governmental action to protect us and our visitors from the virus that has so far killed 200, 000 Americans as a selling point, at the very time that South Dakota has been one of the top 2 states for per capita infections in the United States for weeks now. She is bragging about it. Come to South Dakota and have your covid party here, folks. We don’t need no stinking masks! Social distancing is an attack on your freedom to make the rest of us sick! ……….. This is sickness.
I like the image of Kruel Kristi and her boytoy Corey doing contact tracing. You know if a real governor saw that need for her state she would actually do it.