Rushmore State News

South Dakota finds itself at 469 deaths per million making it 24th in the country when it comes to COVID-related deaths, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

The project found that when it comes to COVID-19 data, people have been looking at decontextualized data, which is causing hysteria like children staying out of school and businesses shutting down. 

South Dakota’s deaths and hospitalizations have not followed the same path as case increases and, instead, the state has slightly below 400 people per million in hospitals , which isn’t anywhere near increased case numbers. 

“South Dakota has a death rate that is less than 1/3 that of Massachusetts, and less than 1/4 that of New York. It is currently experiencing a surge, though like other "third wavers'', the hospitalizations and deaths are significantly lower than the case surges would suggest,” the commentary states. “South Dakota has had a gradual increase in hospitalizations since mid-September, not at just shy of 400/million, about 30% less than that of Massachusetts at its peak, and 60% lower than that of New York. South Dakota's peak daily deaths/million are 7. 

“South Dakota's hospital surge was far more gradual than first wave states, and now appears to be slowly turning over. Cases, like all third wave states are almost logarithmically related to hospitalizations and deaths, where testing has increased 2 fold from the "second wave" and more than 10-fold the testing in the first wave. South Dakota has maintained an enviably low unemployment rate of 4.1%, second in the nation.”

Since Sept. 15, there has been a significant increase in testing for COVID-19 at 55 percent, which has also led to an increase in positive cases, leading many to assume the country is heading into a third wave of infections and deaths.

Emily Burns with The Pragmatist writes that it’s important to put the new numbers into context so that people will make wise decisions regarding what to do about the pandemic. She writes that in May, cases were tracked at nearly the same as hospitalizations. She notes that deaths and hospitalizations are more reliable data when tracking than cases are.

With COVID-19 testing up 70 percent since the second wave, Burns points out that the surge in testing is responsible for the increased number of new cases seen across the nation, not an increased infection rate many have been led to believe.