Via The Washington Post, Tom Dean, a 75-year-old semi-retired doctor, describes the situation: A doctor reminds that coronavirus/covid-19 "is still here" while America focuses on election outcome. Excerpt:
Election Day is over, and guess what? The virus is still here. It didn’t just go away like the president said. We’re not rounding any corners. Nobody I know in South Dakota stopped talking about it because the voting is done. How could we? It’s right in our faces. It’s spreading. It keeps getting worse.
Look, I’m as tired of hearing about covid as the president seems to be. I’m so sick of this virus, but what else should I be focused on, exactly? I’m one of three doctors in this county. We have to do a little bit of everything in a rural community, and this virus follows me wherever I go. We test people at our clinic, and probably about half are positive. We give them supplemental oxygen in our local hospital until they get critical, and then we have to transfer them to the ICU in Sioux Falls. I’m also a medical adviser for our nursing home, and it just had a big outbreak. Now they have eight or 10 empty beds.
Jerauld County is an out-of-the-way place. We don’t have a whole lot, but we’re proud of what we have, so it pains me that we’re becoming famous now for our statistics. One in every 20 people has gotten sick in about the last month. Our death rate is the highest in the country, but it’s more than that. These aren’t anonymous cases. These are my patients, my friends, my family. I know every single one.
We got lucky early in this pandemic, and I think that made us complacent. It was China, Seattle, New York. There was some hope in rural America that this might stay more of a big-city problem. We have about 2,000 people here spread out over 500 square miles of cows and wheat, so social distancing came naturally to us. The governor decided to kind of pretend it away and keep everything going as usual. You didn’t see too many people wearing masks. The school opened back up. They started playing football. I bet we went three months at the clinic without seeing a single positive test.
How do you go from nothing to the worst outbreak in the country? I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer. We started to see a few little pockets of it, but the virus seemed fairly contained. There was a small outbreak at a cafe, and that led to seven or eight cases in our farming community, but then it seemed to go away. There were a few cases up north at the beef jerky plant. A couple of our students came down with it. Then a few teachers. I went into the clinic one day this fall, and the phones were ringing off the hook. Coughs. Fevers. Chills.
We tested people as they pulled up in their cars. We have rapid tests, so you hope and pray for those 15 minutes. I was worried about how fast this could spread through town. We have one grocery store, one bank, one pharmacy — it’s all the same Petri dish. I was worried about what would happen if covid got into the nursing home, where both of my parents lived. I told myself: Maybe it’s the flu or something seasonal that’s going around.
Positive. Positive. Positive. Positive. We had 11 new cases within about five hours.
