This can't be real -- really?

 November 16, 2020

The press coverage that stopped me cold was this: a South Dakota ER nurse @JodiDoering says her Covid-19 patients often “don’t want to believe that Covid is real.”

1 Alicia Kohn, The Hill, November 16, 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/526204-south-dakota-nurse-says-many-dying-patients-still-insist-covid-19-not

“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’ And when they should be... facetiming their families, they’re filled with anger and hatred.”

A South Dakota emergency room nurse on Monday expressed frustration that many of her patients don't believe they are dying of COVID-19.

Jodi Doering's tweet went viral on social media over the weekend after she tweeted about patients who "don’t believe the virus is real ... while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm."

"It wasn't one particular patient, it's just a culmination of so many people," Doering told CNN's "New Day." "And their last, dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.... People want it to be influenza, they want it to be pneumonia," Doering said. "We've even had people say, 'You know, I think it might be lung cancer.' ... Even after positive results come back, some people just don't believe it."

Doering said multiple patients target nurses like her with their "anger and hatred."

"They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that 'stuff' because they don’t have COVID because it’s not real," she tweeted on Saturday. "I think it's just a belief that it's not real and nursing happens to be on the receiving end of that," she told CNN.

Other health professionals have accused South Dakota's leaders of also being in denial.

“You in the Dakotas … you knew it was coming,” Dr. Ali Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, told USA TODAY this month. “You denied it ... even today you are denying it.”

Mokdad was responding to South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem saying her state's per capita death rate was better than New York's over the course of the pandemic. 

Tuesday data from the COVID Tracking Project shows that South Dakota and neighboring North Dakota continue to have the highest per capita rates of COVID-19 infection and death in the nation.  

In fact, their case-rates are higher than any nation on earth.  Governor Noem is correct that New York's per capita death rate is higher, which discounts two significant facts -- 1. those all happened early, before doctors had much sense about possible treatments; and 2. it happened selectively, mainly to nursing homes with elderly patients most susceptible, in NYC.   

Here are some comparative numbers for the past ten months, and for the past ten weeks.  Note that North and South Dakota are "out-performing" on new cases; their death rates are more modest until you look at recent data

Here's the overall data for Cases per 100K, and Deaths per 100K (Since January 2020), and yes, NY and NJ are well ahead of the Dakotas on total death-rate, even though the Dakotas 'win' the Case Loads

But here's the RECENT DATA, from the ill-fated Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota to now

We have clear winners in the Dakotas on both Case-rates and Death-rates. One out of 11 are infected in North Dakota recently, and 1 out of 14 in South Dakota, but "THIS ISN'T REAL?"