As mayors across her state plead for social distancing orders to curb the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus, South Dakota’s first-term Republican Gov. Kristi Noem is standing firm on her refusal to do so.
Why?
She apparently believes rugged individualism will carry the day against an invisible, deadly enemy.
Or, as she put it earlier this month, “South Dakota is not New York City.”
Noem is leaving it up to individual South Dakotans to decide whether to “exercise their right to work, to worship and to play. Or to even stay at home.”
But the ironic result of taking no action is that South Dakota now does resemble New York: it’s become a major hot spot for Covid-19.
The state, with a population of about 900,000 and few hospitals, has reported almost a thousand cases of coronavirus infection. Six patients have died.
The virus has hit South Dakota’s largest city, Sioux Falls, especially hard.
As we reported, the giant Smithfield pork-processing plant is located there, and on Sunday it shut down indefinitely after hundreds of workers got sick.
“A shelter-in-place order is needed now. It is needed today,” says Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, who, the Washington Post reports, “has had to improvise with voluntary recommendations in the absence of statewide action.”
But Noem, a fervent supporter of President Trump, still refuses.
Drew Harris, a population health researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, told NPR that the pandemic is like a prairie wildfire and a stay-at-home order is like a fire break.
“You always know that some embers are going to jump over the fire break that starts new fires. But they’re much more manageable and you just put out those hot spots one at a time,” Harris says.
“Our time to act on this is right now,” says Mayor TenHaken.
