Trump's states that can "open" early

The whole notion that there are wide-open spaces that are somehow virus-proof—which the president* apparently believes—is, of course, dangerous nonsense. South Dakota is now a hotspot because of one processing plant. Idaho, which was the last state to have a COVID-19 fatality, is getting hit now as well, especially on the Nez Perce Reservation. Nez Perce county has had 10 deaths among its 40,000 residents. Ada County has had nine deaths among its 500,000 residents. One wrong sneeze and you have a hotspot.

  Charles P Pierce

South Dakota is home to one of the largest single coronavirus clusters anywhere in the United States, with more than 300 workers at a giant ­pork-processing plant falling ill. With the case numbers continuing to spike, the company was forced to announce the indefinite closure of the facility Sunday, threatening the U.S. food supply.

  WaPo

The company, Smithfield, is closing more plants now.

Trump has been eager to get the economy on its feet again by the beginning of May after record rises in unemployment claims and dramatic falls in the stock market.

Yet as South Dakota’s experience shows, no part of the country is immune to being ravaged by the virus.

[...]

“A shelter-in-place order is needed now. It is needed today,” said Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, whose city is at the center of South Dakota’s outbreak and who has had to improvise with voluntary recommendations in the absence of statewide action.

[...]

Reopening the country by May is “not even remotely achievable,” said TenHaken, who, like Trump and Noem, is a Republican. “We’re in the early innings of this thing in Sioux Falls.”

[...]

But the governor continued to resist. Instead, she used a media briefing Monday to announce trials of a drug that President Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential breakthrough in the fight against the coronavirus, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

“It’s an exciting day,” she boasted, repeatedly citing her conversations with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

[...]

[O]ver the course of last week, the numbers surged as the virus ripped through the city’s Smithfield Foods production plant, a colossus that employs 3,700 people — many of them immigrants — and churns out 18 million servings of pork product per day.

On Monday alone, 57 more workers were confirmed to have positive diagnoses, bringing the total well above 300 — and making it one of the country’s largest clusters.

[...]

The factory, like other food production facilities, had earlier been deemed essential by the federal government.

[...]

Before the closure, workers had complained that they were not given sufficient access to protective gear, such as masks. The company said Thursday that it had taken steps to reduce the spread, including “adding extra hand sanitizing stations, boosting personal protective equipment, continuing to stress the importance of personal hygiene.” But workers said they were required to work so closely together that it was impossible to stay healthy.

[...]

Sioux Falls, home to nearly 200,000 people, is the state’s largest city. TenHaken, the mayor, said in an interview that he has done everything within his power to enforce social distancing, including using a “no lingering” ordinance to confine restaurants to takeout and delivery service and strongly recommending that all nonessential businesses close.

He has little power of enforcement, however, and no ability to control what happens in nearby jurisdictions. Restaurants within Sioux Falls may have shut down for in-person dining, but the rules don’t apply outside city limits.

[...]

The South Dakota State Medical Association wrote Noem a letter April 3 warning the governor that the state “may soon face the challenges and hardships currently being seen in New York and other large cities across the country if a shelter in place order is not issued immediately.”

Noem is one of five governors representing relatively rural states — North Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska and Arkansas are the others — still resisting such calls. All are Republicans, and all have used similar justifications for going against the national grain.

[...]

Citing scientific modeling, the [South Dakota] governor acknowledged this month that up to 70 percent of residents in her state may ultimately fall ill with covid-19. But, she suggested, it wasn’t up to government to tell them how to behave.

“The people themselves are primarily responsible for their safety,” she said. “They are the ones that are entrusted with expansive freedoms.”

[...]

“In rural areas, there’s less access to health care,” said DenYelle Kenyon, director of the public health program at the University of South Dakota. “And all it takes is one case to spread to a small community.”

During a media briefing Friday afternoon, Gov. Kristi Noem said the latest analysis of data by state healthcare officials projects that South Dakota will experience its peak number of coronavirus cases in mid-June.

“But when we’re looking at our data and our numbers and the number of people who could get infected, we anticipate it will be 265,000 people to 600,000 people in the state of South Dakota,” she said of the state’s total population of 882,235 people. “What this means … is we will need at our peak infection date, sometime in the middle of June, about 5,000 hospital beds dedicated to COVID-19. We will also need 1,300 ventilators to take care of the people in our state who will need them.”

Those numbers represent 30 to 70 percent of the state’s population.

[...]

/“The number of ventilators in our state is currently at 525,” [Kim Malsam-Rysdon, secretary of the Department of Health,] said. “That includes both ventilators and related equipment that currently is available in hospital settings as well as what we have available in our state cache. We have requests in to FEMA as well as private suppliers to help bridge the gap of ventilators needs.”

[...]

>Noem was asked by a reporter later in the briefing if South Dakota has the extra hospital beds and ventilators needed for the projected COVID-19 patients.

“We do not, but we have a plan to get there, and we will get there by the time we reach our peak infection date in June,” she said.

[...]

The statistics Noem shared Friday show that “we have cut the number of people at our peak infection rate who will be sick at one time almost in half,” she said, “which is fantastic. By looking at these charts, you will notice that we have pushed our peak infection date out. We still have a long road in front of us.”

The governor said South Dakotans will need to practice its current mitigation efforts through August.

She also described the state’s current projections as dynamic and not static.

  Vermillion Plain Talk

And yet, no shelter in place order.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.