Death Came for the Dakotas
In
terms of the coronavirus, they’re a theater of American disgrace.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
- Dec. 5, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET
Under normal circumstances, I would
have flown to one or both of the Dakotas to write this column, but the whole
point is that these aren’t normal circumstances. And I don’t have a death wish.
Too much? Probably. But how else to
convey the proper timbre of outrage, the right pitch of grief, over what
happened there? Deep into the coronavirus pandemic, when there was no doubt
about the damage that Covid-19 could do, the Dakotas scaled their morbid
heights, propelled by denial and defiance. They surged to the top of national
rankings of state residents per capita who were hospitalized with Covid-related
symptoms or whose recent deaths were linked to it.
As of Friday afternoon, South Dakota
led the country in the average daily number of recent Covid-associated deaths
per capita, with three for every 100,000 people, according to a New York Times database. North Dakota was second, with
1.5.
More than 40 percent
of South Dakota’s 1,033 Covid-related deaths to that point occurred in
November, according to statistics from the
Covid Tracking Project, and the same was true of North Dakota’s 983
deaths.
The Dakotas are a horror story that
didn’t have to be, a theater of American disgrace. Want to understand the
tendencies — pathologies might be the better word — that made America’s dance
with the coronavirus so deadly? Visit the Dakotas.
Intellectually, I mean.
“It’s mind-boggling,” Jamie Smith, the
leader of the Democratic minority in South Dakota’s House of Representatives,
told me. He was referring primarily to how politicized such basic safety
measures as social distancing and masks became, but also to many South
Dakotans’ distrust of science and unshakable belief that the virus wouldn’t
come for them.
“We’re dug in,” he said when we spoke
recently. Of the 10 counties in America with
the most Covid-related deaths per capita, three are in South Dakota.
Lawrence Klemin, a
Republican legislator in North Dakota who just finished his two-year term as
the speaker of its House of Representatives, told me that people in his state
“are pretty much independent-minded about how they conduct their affairs.”
“I don’t know if
maybe some people are stubborn,” he added, but the deep sigh in his voice said that
he knows full well that many people are. And the most stubborn, he said, have
been the loudest. Throughout the pandemic, he said, he was deluged with
communications from constituents adamantly opposed to any mask-wearing
requirement, which North Dakota didn’t even have. He heard almost nothing from
the other side.
But after Gov. Doug Burgum, a
Republican, used an executive order on Nov. 13 to institute precisely such a
mandate, a poll showed
that a significant majority of North Dakotans favored it. Maybe they’d just
seen too much dying by then. Or maybe, Klemin conceded, they’d been a silent
majority for a while and political leaders underestimated their fellow
citizens.
Regardless, he said, the state
definitely should have taken that step last spring or summer — before the
number of coronavirus cases skyrocketed, before hospitals were so overrun that
sick North Dakotans had to be sent to neighboring states and before his own mother tested
positive and died in early October.
Until recently, Governor Burgum was
loath to exert much pressure on North Dakotans and steered clear of the
social-distancing orders put in place by so many other states. But he did
invest heavily in testing and never merrily shrugged off the threat of the
coronavirus the way his Republican counterpart in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi
Noem, did.
Deaths and
hospitalizations have dropped significantly in North Dakota over the
past two weeks. On Friday evening, it ranked just ninth among states for the percentage of its residents
hospitalized with Covid-19.
South
Dakota, in contrast, was No. 1. Still no mask mandate there, and no leadership at all
from Noem, who didn’t just welcome but beckoned President Trump to Mount
Rushmore for that enormous Independence Day rally, the one at which
his perpetually maskless entourage clustered near a similarly maskless crowd.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s romantic partner, tested positive then,
compelling the two of them to go into isolation. Sadly, they didn’t
remain there.
One month later, Noem played
cheerleader for a 10-day motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., that attracted some
460,000 people. In an article in The Times, my colleagues Mark Walker
and Jack Healy described it as “a Woodstock of unmasked, uninhibited
coronavirus defiance.”
Just before Thanksgiving,
Noem announced the passing of her 98-year-old grandmother, one of 13 residents
of a South Dakota nursing home who died in a two-week period. The home’s
administrator told The Daily Beast that the
other 12 residents, along with many of the nursing home’s workers, had tested
positive for the coronavirus, but not Noem’s grandmother. (Hmmm …) While Noem
publicly mourned her lost family member, she drew no particular attention to
Covid-19’s rampage among her grandmother’s companions.
I get the sense that Noem has
presidential aspirations (though she has denied that). If she ever presses the
accelerator on those, please remember this savage season, and please remember
her damning indifference to it.
When I said “horror story,” I was
cribbing. That was a description used in a series of mid-November tweets from a South
Dakota emergency room nurse, Jodi Doering, that went viral. Doering was reeling
from tending to dying Covid-19 patients who continued to insist that the
coronavirus was some kind of hoax.
They “scream at you for a magic
medicine” and warn that Joe Biden will ruin America even as they’re “gasping
for breath,” she wrote. She added: “They call you names and ask why you have to
wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real.”
“They stop yelling at
you when they get intubated,” she wrote. “It’s like a horror movie that never
ends.” I altered that last sentence. Doering put a curse word before “horror,”
and who can blame her?
The Dakotas are
hardly alone in dealing with an onslaught of coronavirus cases,
hospitalizations and deaths over the past month, a grim one for most of
America. Neighboring Minnesota, a much less politically conservative state, has
lately rivaled South Dakota for new cases per day per capita. Iowa, which abuts
southeastern South Dakota, is also in terrible shape, as Elaine Godfrey wrote in The
Atlantic on Thursday.
“To visit Iowa right now is to travel
back in time to the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in places such as
New York City and Lombardy and Seattle, when the horror was fresh and the
sirens never stopped,” Godfrey wrote. “The virus has been raging for eight
months in this country; Iowa just hasn’t been acting like it.”
Then again, has California? It got
educated early, but if the lessons had taken as well as they should have, its
governor, Gavin Newsom, might not have had to announce the stringent new lockdown measures that he did on
Thursday as the state’s intensive care units were stretched almost to the
limit. In New York City, meanwhile, the daily rate of positive coronavirus
tests exceeded 5 percent for the first time since May, according to city figures.
The truth is that the Dakotas are as
emblematic as they are exceptional, the American story — or at least a strain
of it — in miniature. In resisting the lockdowns, slowdowns and sacrifices that
many other states committed to, they indulged and encouraged a selective (and
often warped) reading of scientific evidence, a rebellion against experts and a
twisted concept of individual liberty that was obvious all over the country and
contributed mightily to our suffering.
“North Dakotans will come to each
other’s aids in a heartbeat, but when asked to give up personal freedom for an
amorphous common good — that’s difficult,” Paul Carson, an infectious-diseases
doctor and a professor of public health at North Dakota State University, told
me. Just recently, Carson said, a lawmaker from the western half of the state —
whose denizens regard its eastern half, where Carson lives, as elitist and too
liberal — wrote to him to share a famous quotation from
Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
For too long, staying
safe from the coronavirus was indeed an amorphous mission to many North and
South Dakotans, and their false sense of security was surely intensified by
what they heard from President Trump, who spoke of disease-ridden blue states
versus freedom-loving red ones and kept promising that this would all blow
over. “We maybe believed that our rural nature sheltered us from what cities
like yours were experiencing,” Carson said. “Then we found out, very brutally,
that was wrong.”
Klemin, the North Dakota legislator,
said that his mother, Carol Roaldson, was
99 when she died but had always thrilled to the idea of reaching 100 and was in
excellent health before the coronavirus swept in. Her nursing home had to
establish a segregated unit for the many residents who were infected in
September, he said. He couldn’t visit his mother after she was moved there.
But when she sank into what were
clearly her last days, he was allowed by her beside — in a face mask and
shield. “I watched her die,” he told me. “That was a very sad day.”