- Kristi Noem said her state’s pandemic response has been better than “virtually all other states”.
- The South Dakota governor refused to issue a masking warrant across the state.
- For months, South Dakota has been one of the nation’s riskiest states in terms of COVID-19 cases.
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South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem praised her response to the COVID-19 pandemic in a Fox News Interview Tuesday night, suggesting that his state fared better than almost all other states, despite having a higher rate of general cases than all but one state.
One in 500 people in South Dakota died of COVID-19 and one in eight residents contracted the virus. The Midwestern state has a population of 884,659, according to a 2019 population estimate by the US Census Bureau, and has had 108,431 probable cases and 1,779 confirmed deaths since the pandemic began.
Noem detailed his approach to dealing with the double economic and health crisis, saying that the state has taken “a very different way” to protect the vulnerable, while still allowing people to “put food on the table”.
“We had tragedies and losses,” said Noem in the interview. “But we also get over it better than almost any other state.”
Noem, a Republican, adopted a “freedom first” strategy, refusing to issue a masked mandate across the state and emphasizing the importance of protecting the state’s economy.
During the peak of November, South Dakota was listed as one of the 10 most dangerous states when the state’s positive COVID test rate approached 60%, the highest in the country at the time. Forbes called her one of the most “defiantly anti-mask” governors.
Despite having the 6th lowest population in the country, South Dakota has the second highest overall rate of coronavirus cases on February 1, according to the Statista. Since the start of the pandemic, the state has had 12,236 cases per 100,000 people, according to the data site. Only North Dakota had a higher rate.
South Dakota’s cases and deaths have been declining since November, and many are hopeful that the tide is returning to the state that has already been devastated, as vaccines become more readily available. The two Dakotas have excelled in launching vaccines in recent weeks.
Still, it was unclear what numbers Noem was referring to when he suggested that the state had survived the pandemic better than almost everyone else. And it is not the first time that she suggests that the state is doing better than it really is.
In November, while the state was battling 9,000 active cases, she told Fox News: “We are doing great in South Dakota. We are running COVID-19, but our economy is also thriving.”