Wednesday on FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) dismissed a study claiming the existence of a link between last month’s Sturgis motorcycle rally in her home state and a spike in COVID-19.
“What they did is they took a snapshot in time, and they did a lot of speculation, did some back of the napkin math and made up some numbers and published them,” she explained. “This study wasn’t even done by a health care study, it was done by the Institute of Labor Economics, and it’s completely untrue. That’s what’s so frustrating is I know the media does not like what South Dakota has done.”
“They have deemed me as the governor that made all the wrong decisions by letting my people have freedom, by using personal responsibility,” Noem continued. “But, listen, our people are happy. We’ve had big events. We have, in South Dakota, 124 cases that were tied to the Sturgis motorcycle bike rally out of a half a million people that came. So what they have done here is completely false, and it’s unfair, and it’s not doing the public service.”
Noem argued her state had weathered the worst of the pandemic more successfully than other states that had instituted more drastic measures.
“You know, other states are tracking cases,” she. I think we have 11 other cases that have tracked, you know, people that have traveled to the Sturgis motorcycle bike rally, but it’s less than 300 cases. And I think that is really what’s wrong with this study that we see that was released that the media jumped all over is the kind of speculation that they put out there, the inaccuracies are just unfair, and not truthful whatsoever. You know, this is what modeling has done throughout the pandemic. On a typical day in the pandemic, the models and the experts all told me I’d have 10,000 people in the hospital on any given day. And I’ve had less than 100 the vast majority of the days. I have less than 100 people in the hospital today.
So we’re taking the virus seriously, but we’re also recognizing that there’s consequences to what we’ve seen happen in other states, that shutting down businesses, stopping people’s way of life has some devastating impacts on them and their ability to put food on the table for their families. So we’ve taken a very balanced approach in South Dakota. I know the media hates it. I know they’re going to continue to come after me and my decision-making. They’re going to continue to try to destroy South Dakota for what we have done and the path that we’ve taken. But I still believe that in our state, it has worked out for our people and that they appreciate it. They appreciate the fact that I trusted them. And we have the strongest economy in the nation today. Our people are working, they’re taking care of their families, and they recognize that we’ve weathered this situation much better than the rest of the country.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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