South Dakota
Briand provides a graph like this for all 50 US States plus New York City, showing weekly deaths with lines of different colors for each year. The green line shows weekly mortality for South Dakota from August 2019 to August 2020. It is similar to all the previous years, with no appreciable increase or decrease. There is not even any spike in March 2020 when the majority of other states had one. Yet South Dakota was singled out for criticism by a board member of Pfizer, who was also a former commissioner of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb, for letting covid-19 "travel largely unfettered" with only mild social isolation mandates. Ironically the mildness of the government's approach most likely helped protect people from harm. There are other factors that may have helped, including that South Dakota is very highly rated for quality affordable senior living and healthcare (Wong 2016).
The results in South Dakota stand in stark contrast to regions like Michigan and New York City which had very poor outcomes. However, in Stalinesque style, Anthony Fauci criticized South Dakota's governor for allowing "increased cases", and he praised Michigan for its strict solitary confinement and social isolation mandates despite its having among the worst outcomes. Fauci also praised New York City early on before the data came out showing how extremely high the mortality was there due to one of the most severe nursing home understaffing crises in the world (Jones 2021). Please consider the graphs showing increased all-cause mortality for Michigan and New York City, and compare them to the above graph for South Dakota. Then look at the harsh criticisms South Dakota received from Gottlieb (Mayer 2021) and Fauci (Czachor 2021). The irony is quite remarkable.
Briand provides a graph like this for all 50 US States plus New York City, showing weekly deaths with lines of different colors for each year. The green line shows weekly mortality for South Dakota from August 2019 to August 2020. It is similar to all the previous years, with no appreciable increase or decrease. There is not even any spike in March 2020 when the majority of other states had one. Yet South Dakota was singled out for criticism by a board member of Pfizer, who was also a former commissioner of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb, for letting covid-19 "travel largely unfettered" with only mild social isolation mandates. Ironically the mildness of the government's approach most likely helped protect people from harm. There are other factors that may have helped, including that South Dakota is very highly rated for quality affordable senior living and healthcare (Wong 2016).
The results in South Dakota stand in stark contrast to regions like Michigan and New York City which had very poor outcomes. However, in Stalinesque style, Anthony Fauci criticized South Dakota's governor for allowing "increased cases", and he praised Michigan for its strict solitary confinement and social isolation mandates despite its having among the worst outcomes. Fauci also praised New York City early on before the data came out showing how extremely high the mortality was there due to one of the most severe nursing home understaffing crises in the world (Jones 2021). Please consider the graphs showing increased all-cause mortality for Michigan and New York City, and compare them to the above graph for South Dakota. Then look at the harsh criticisms South Dakota received from Gottlieb (Mayer 2021) and Fauci (Czachor 2021). The irony is quite remarkable.