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Comment by RobAtticus | Hacker News Reader

South Dakota is #3 in cases per capita and #10 in deaths per capita in the US. It's August-November stretch was just brutal, peaking with a death rate of 200/1M for the week of Nov 16.

Sure it's raw numbers may not have been as dramatic as NY, a state with over 20x as many people, but it definitely was not example setter.

Edit: My numbers are based on data I collected from NYT, but Worldometers shows SD as #2 in cases per million and #9 in deaths per million: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us

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> 200/1M

I understand the metric but we don't even have a million people in the state. so when you compare ratios it might look high when comparing to other populations, but in reality, it's remarkable at how low the numbers actually are, again, given the difference in mask policy.

again, there was no summer spike due to tourism. there was no spike due to almost half a million additional people riding in from out of state for the Sturgis Rally (temporarily significantly increasing our population!). iirc, two people died after returning home afterwards. very few bikers wore masks anywhere. more Rally-goers died from traffic accidents (as is usual for the Rally) than died from the 'vid.

You can change it to 20/100k if you wish, it doesn't really make a difference.

SD case counts per 1M on selected dates:

Jul 15 2020 - 463

Aug 15 2020 - 725

Sep 15 2020 - ~1800

Doubling in a month seems like a spike to me.

are you inferring that the rise in case counts in September is somehow correlated to the summer tourism season, which is pretty well over by September? I see no evidence that points to this. surely if the summer tourism season caused a spike in cases(!), you would see it during the summer tourism season, and not afterward?

You keep talking about Sturgis, which ended on Aug 16. There is known incubation time between contact and testing positive, and even by 10 days later (Aug 26) the rate was at ~1200. Also July -> Aug was a 55% increase in cases as well, even before that, which coincides more with summer.

I'm not going to say definitively what caused what here, but your anecdotal recollection of what happened in SD is not really supported by the numbers.

NY had created some of the harshest anti-covid regimes in the country, and by your own data NY was still far worse.

NY had 24% fewer cases per capita. How is that "far worse"?

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