Coronavirus in rural America (Part CIV): the Dakotas

Frank Bruni reported a few days ago for the New York Times under the headline "Death Came for the Dakotas."  Here's an excerpt that is quite harsh: 

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.

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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.”

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“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.”

The story mentions the death of elderly loved ones of two Dakota politicians in nursing homes, one the 98-year-old grandmother of South Dakota governor Kristi Noem and the other the 99-year-old mother of a North Dakota Republican legislator.  

The tone of the story is pretty condescending, and it reminds me of this Tweet by Sarah Smarsh, which I caught a screen shot of a few days ago: 

The photos accompanying the story are from a street in Vermillion, population 10,751, in the southeast part of the state, home of the University of South Dakota.  

The second story is by Annie Gowen of the Washington Post, published just yesterday, dateline Mitchell, South Dakota, population 15,524.  The headline is "'God be with us.'  Covid-19 becomes personal in a South Dakota town as neighbors die and the town debates a mask mandate."  She leads here story with details of the death and funeral of a beloved local coach, Buck Timmins.  

As the funeral director tucked blankets over the knees of Timmins’s wife, Nanci, Pastor Rhonda Wellsandt-Zell told the small group of masked mourners that just as there had been seasons in the coach’s life — basketball season, football season, volleyball season — Mitchell was now enduring a phase of its own.

Pandemic season.

In a state where the Republican governor, Kristi L. Noem, has defied calls for a statewide mask mandate even as cases hit record levels, many in this rural community an hour west of Sioux Falls ignored the virus for months, not bothering with masks or social distancing. Restaurants were packed. Big weddings and funerals went on as planned.

Then people started dying. The wife of the former bank president. A state legislator. The guy whose family has owned the bike shop since 1959. Then Timmins, a mild-spoken 72-year-old who had worked with hundreds of local kids during six decades as a Little League and high school coach and referee.

His death shook Mitchell just as its leaders were contemplating something previously denounced and dismissed: a requirement that its staunchly conservative residents wear masks.

As Wellsandt-Zell led those mourning Timmins in the hymn “Jesus Loves Me,” the rumble of an approaching helicopter cut through the sound of the singing and the mourners’ soft tears. In Mitchell, the medical emergency helicopter, once a rare occurrence, now comes nearly every day, ferrying the growing number of people desperately ill with covid-19 to a hospital that might be able to save them. 

And here's a story with a similar them in that it is about how the death of a child, from COVID, transformed a Missouri town's stance on the pandemic.  The dateline is Washington, Missouri, population 13,892.  An earlier story out of that town, which might more accurately be described as exurban, is here.