By Carrie Moritz, Gazette
Since the first death from COVID-19 in South Dakota was recorded on March 10, 2020, much of the state has waited with bated breath for the effects of the virus to hit the state as hard as it did New York, California, and Washington.
However, South Dakota appeared to sidestep most of its effects, even after a hotspot happened at Smithfield Foods in April. Overall, from March until August, the South Dakota Department of Health reported a confirmed daily case count that hovered around 50-100 new cases per day, and relatively few deaths. By August 1st, only 8,867 people out of a population of around 885,000 people had been diagnosed with Sars-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. A few counties in the state hadn’t had a single case, and several didn’t have a single active case at the time. Due to mitigation measures taken early on, precautions that were still occurring, and a small, rural population, until August 1, the virus was slow to spread. In the past six weeks, that has changed.
According to the South Dakota Department of Health, of those relatively few cumulative cases, 134 people, or 2%, had died as a result of the virus, either from its effects of creating a cytokine storm (an overreaction of the immune system) or from the side effects such as pneumonia, heart attacks, or stroke, which have been listed by the CDC. A majority of the deaths have been in people older than 65. Across the United States, over 200,000 people have died as a result of having COVID-19.
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