For a guy who doles out Pinocchios in his work as “Fact Checker” for The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler had no problem tweeting a story that could have used a bit of his supposed lie-detecting expertise without scrutiny.
In a Tuesday tweet, Kessler shared a story about an outbreak of coronavirus in South Dakota that blamed GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, who has remained against a statewide stay-at-home order.
Kessler confidently declared, “it was ever thus –> South Dakota’s governor resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nation’s largest coronavirus hot spots.”
The piece Kessler shared was published in The Washington Post on Monday and ran with the headline, “South Dakota’s governor resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nation’s largest coronavirus hot spots.”
The story’s author, reporter Griff Witte, predicated this argument on the fact that the amount of cases in the state has increased significantly.
While it is true that the number of cases has been growing, the evidence doesn’t exactly support the “one of the largest hot spots” moniker.
The total amount of infected residents in South Dakota is 1,168 as of Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins, but total coronavirus infections nationwide is over 600,000, making the state’s share of coronavirus infections 0.19 percent of the total cases in the U.S.
Looking at it another way, the Census Bureau pegged South Dakota’s 2019 population at 884,659, so that comes to about 0.13 percent of the population of the state infected.
Compare that to New York state, which has a reported population of 19,453,561 and 214,454 cases, meaning 1.1 percent of the state’s population is infected.
Maybe South Dakota is more like a “lukewarm spot,” at least for now. Is it fair to compare a densely populated place like New York to a relatively sparse one like South Dakota? Probably not, but that is precisely the point the governor made when choosing not to shut her state down.
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