What a controversial take, that we should be optimistic.
Exactly. I wouldn't have a problem with a governor who has been doing a good job with COVID saying this. The problem is that she's been doing such an awful job.
By what measure? Certainly not by the COVID death rate. Could you direct me to the empirical measures by which she's doing an "awful job"?
Case numbers are still rising, and there is no mask mandate.
Oh, and let's not forget the fighting tooth-and-nail against a shutdown, which suddenly turned several South Dakota meet plants into covad hotspots. The effect was to turn South Dakota from a covid-19, into an least an orange level State per capita. The fact that it should be in such a condition with literally almost zero international travel, or even not much in the way of Interstate travel and commerce outside the interstate, is absolutely indefensible.
What I'm seeing here is a lot of cargo cult science. Instead of making determinations of who did a good job based on the objective measures of death rates (either COVID deaths or excess deaths) you're just saying "they did mask mandates therefore Good Job" or "they did lockdowns therefore Good Job" even if the country or state in question has
significantly worse outcomes.
Japan never locked down and they're barely over a thousand deaths (at the time the doomers claimed that hundreds of thousands of Japanese would die) whereas the Philippines, which I saw many "science supporters" citing as an example of a good lockdown combined with near universal mask wearing, is seeing new surges and has almost three times as many deaths despite having a smaller population. Sweden is pointed to as the disastrous result of doing nothing and yet they still have a lower death rate than Spain or Italy, let alone New York or New Jersey. Not to mention that Sweden's maintained zero or near zero new COVID deaths for the past several weeks.
Cases are misleading because early on the only people being diagnosed were those with severe symptoms whereas once mass testing began it started including healthy asymptomatic carriers instead. Hence why the increase in cases over the past few months still hasn't pushed Georgia or Arizona anywhere
near the death rates of NJ or NY.
If we're looking at deaths then Noem has hardly failed, considering South Dakota has the 12th fewest deaths in the US. It's not like South Dakota never gets visitors, considering it's the home of a little known monument called Mount Rushmore. Certainly she hasn't failed compared to Cuomo or Murphy who somehow managed to achieve the highest fatality rate on Earth, beating out even Brazilian favelas or the packed slums of Mumbai. There's no excuse for such an
objectively bad job and yet for some reason everyone complains about the governors with death rates that aren't even in the same universe.
