A look at the COVID-19 hotspot in South Dakota
To explore more data on COVID-19, please go to covid19.topos.com
South Dakota is currently experiencing one of the highest rates of new COVID-19 cases in the United States. From Monday, April 6 to Sunday, April 12, the state saw the number of confirmed cases rise from 288 to 730, a 154 percent increase over the week.
The epicenter of COVID-19 cases is Minnehaha County, where a plant owned by Smithfield Foods, the largest pork processor in the world, is located. Smithfield Foods has shut down its Minnehaha County plant as a result of 238 employees out of 3700 testing positive for the coronavirus, representing a third of the cases reported in the state.
We believe that the next hotspot will be in Lincoln County located south of Minnehaha County, based on an analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program’s Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES, 2016) that tracks where workers in each census block reside.
While 90 percent of the employees reside in Minnehaha county, the next largest number of employees, 202, are from Lincoln County. As of April 14, 55 cases have been reported in Lincoln, but we expect that number to rise substantially if transmission from asymptomatic or mild cases from the plant continue to power community transmission of COVID-19, without a statewide stay-at-home order from the governor.
Also of note is that there are a small number of employees who work at the plant who reside in Native American reservations like the Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Lake Traverse Reservations. Given the critical lack of medical caregivers and resources on reservations and the greater vulnerability of the Native American population to flu-like viruses like H1N1 where Native Americans saw a mortality rate of 3.7 deaths per 100K people compared to 0.9 deaths for the overall population, the transmission of cases to employees who reside in these reservations could be devastating.
To explore more data on COVID-19, please go to covid19.topos.com
