The success of the anti-lockdown states still baffles the left in the media
I’ll confess to being a bit surprised when I saw this headline over at NBC News today. “North Dakota and South Dakota set global Covid records. How did they turn the tide?” Given the low opinion most MSM newsrooms have for the red states, it seemed unusual for NBC to admit what the numbers have been telling us for months. Following a significant surge in the fall, both states have seen their total number of cases trending downward and are leading the nation in rolling out the vaccines.
But the article quickly jumps into gear being critical of how Doug Burgum and Kristi Noem handled the pandemic anyway. After crediting the states with tremendous progress, the report immediately turns around and says their success may be “tenuous,” pointing to resistance against government mandates and the “politicization of infection prevention measures.”
Unlike states that had soaring case counts early in the pandemic, neither North Dakota nor South Dakota ever issued stay-at-home orders. Mask mandates, if they came, came late. Yet numbers in both states have come down significantly since the late fall peak, and the Dakotas have emerged as national leaders in vaccine distribution — both are closing in on 5 percent of their total populations’ being fully vaccinated, putting them in the top five in the country.
But beneath the surface, experts fear that the success could be tenuous: Misinformation, a false sense of security and the politicization of infection prevention measures are setting the stage for a possible second surge.
By Halloween, Covid-19 had been ripping through South Dakota for two months. But when Nick Brown, 29, drove through downtown Brookings — the state’s fourth-largest city, near the Minnesota border — he passed a string of bars that hosted maskless crowds. At one bar, a local rock band played for a packed house.
The fact that both North and South Dakota proved more resilient to the spread of the pandemic probably shouldn’t have been all that surprising for a couple of reasons. It’s true that both states saw significant surges for a couple of months after the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August brought more than half a million people into a very small area, but aside from that their numbers have been pretty low. This brings up some uncomfortable questions for the experts in the media who insist that government lockdowns and mandates are the only way to go.
California and New York have posted some of the worst numbers in the nation over most of the course of the pandemic. They are also two of the states with the harshest government restrictions and highest rates of compliance with face mask orders and social distancing. They are also lagging badly in vaccination deployment. Both Dakotas opted not to shut down and facemask mandates came late in the game and were spotty at best. And yet they are back to low case numbers and they’re leading the nation in vaccinations. How do we account for these facts?
The less charitable among us might simply say that government shutdowns and social distancing mandates just haven’t proven to be as effective as advertised. There is certainly some data out there to support the idea. We can’t say that those measures didn’t help at all, but our language includes the phrase “going viral” for a reason. A novel virus against which humans have no inherent resistance is going to find a way to get around. We can slow the spread if we’re willing to sacrifice enough, but without some form of immunity, it was never going to come to a halt.
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Low population density also has an impact, although California and New York have that outside of the major metro areas too. I live in a rural area of Texas that has seen only a handful of cases too.
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