Nobody Asked Me, but ...: Despite 'orders', county residents should use common sense

NOBODY ASKED ME, but… the coronavirus continues to dominate the news, so I wanted to look at that, and how we, in South Dakota, need to be thinking about it.

More importantly, I want to look at how we, in Minnehaha County, should be looking at it.

As a whole, South Dakota is low on the number of COVID-19 cases, but here in Minnehaha County, we have a definite “hot spot.”

Now, these figures will certainly change by the time this article prints, but as of April 20, the official number of positive cases from the Department of Health was 1,685.

However, 1,500 of those cases were in Minnehaha and adjoining Lincoln counties.

And according to various news reports at the same time, 798 positive cases come from Smithfield employees, with another 143 being from people who had direct contacts with Smithfield workers.

That is a total of 891 “reported” cases tied to one specific location.

If we separate that number, it leaves 609 reported cases in Minnehaha and Lincoln counties.

I have a strong hunch that of those 609, some also came from contact with people associated with Smithfield, who were not easily linked.

(I don’t know about you, but when I go to the grocery store, I don’t ask everyone where they are employed, or if they had contact with anyone who works for Smithfield Foods.)

So, as of April 21, there were only 185 cases in South Dakota not in Minnehaha or Lincoln counties.

But keep in mind, these cases all came within the six weeks since the first five cases were reported on March 10.

For those of you who like percentages, that would be about .03 percent of those living in our state outside of the two previously named counties.

For Minnehaha and Lincoln combined, the rate is 20 times higher at .6 percent.

Now, let’s leap beyond the borders of South Dakota, where many are criticizing the governor for not issuing a “stay at home” order.

For 185 cases over 75,792 square miles this doesn’t make any sense.

However, for 1,500 cases in an area of 1,392 square miles, we have a different story.

Although “stay at home” and “shelter in place” orders aren’t any different than recommendations, with so many people in jobs labeled “essential,” just to make people feel safer, these orders should be issued for Minnehaha and Lincoln counties.

The governor can do that.

Just in Sioux Falls, which is located in both counties, Mayor Paul Ten Haken proposed such an ordinance for the city, but between the first and second readings, he withdrew it. Did his big-money supporters threaten him?

(Paul, buddy, as this had never been a knee-jerk reaction in the first place, why let people talk you out of a good idea? Could it be you wanted it to have a first reading for the symbolic nature, but you never intended it to be enacted?)

However, we shouldn’t need orders to keep us at home as much as possible during a health crisis.

Even if we assume ourselves to be virus-free (and we all know what happens when we assume), should we decide to go out to open county bars packed with people, can we honestly say the same about everyone around us? 

Of course not, especially when we don’t personally know most of the non-social-distanced bar patrons.

And even for the ones we might know, we have no idea where they’ve been.

For readers living in Minnehaha County, imagine one of your drinking buddies was just in Hy-Vee picking up an item that a feverish Smithfield worker with sweaty palms had grabbed previously.

Depending on the packaging, the novel coronavirus can live from anywhere between several hours to several days.

That is why we need to take precautions. We don’t know everyone we have come in contact with, and we especially don’t know who they’ve been around.

This is what “stay at home” and “social distancing” is for.

While we are seeing people on the extreme left politicizing states with Republican governors not having stay at home orders, many of these states also have something else in common, extremely low populations over massive areas.

Then on the extreme right, we see the “social-distancing deniers” picketing the state houses in St. Paul, Minn., Lansing, Mich., Austin, Texas, etc. to get their lawmakers to “re-open” those states.

If everyone would take personal responsibility to limit where they go and to maintain a social distance, these orders would have been unnecessary, but the simple fact that current protests are happening means that some people won’t use common sense in how they interact with others.

If you think about it, the fact that these deniers are able to go out and protest in states with stay at home orders – without being shot or arrested – should tell us that those “orders” are nothing more than the same “recommendation” we have had in South Dakota since mid-March.

So, in effect, the protesters are protesting nothing. 

Or maybe they are just protesting that someone is allowing them to do stupid things, I’m not sure.

At any rate, I finally know what Forrest Gump and his mother meant when they said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”