SIOUX FALLS, SD (AP) – With much of the country experiencing rising virus rates, relief from a devastating wave of coronavirus in the western highlands has provided prudent relief to health officials, though they are concerned that infections remain rampant and holiday meetings revive the worst outbreaks of the pandemic.
The states of the northern sections of the Midwest and the Great Plains saw the worst rates of coronavirus infections in the country in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, it extended hospitals beyond capacity and led to states such as North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin that reported some of the highest per capita deaths in the world. country during November.
But over the past two weeks, those states have seen the average number of daily cases drop, with declines ranging from 20% in Iowa to 66% in North Dakota, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. Since mid-November, the entire region has returned to levels similar to those seen in October.
“We’re in a place where we’ve controlled the fire, but it would be very easy for it to reappear if conditions were right,” said Ryan Demmer, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
For a region that was a harbinger of virus waves now affecting much of the country, the positive direction in the Midwest offers hope that people can come together to take anti-virus precautions seriously while waiting for vaccines during what experts believe will be the last months of the pandemic.
Governors have used declining figures to justify their divergent approaches to fighting the pandemic, even at times fairly. In Minnesota, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz has advocated maintaining some restrictions in early January, saying the boundaries of bars and restaurants are working. In neighboring South Dakota, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem has argued the opposite, using the recent decline in her state’s figures to argue that mask mandates don’t make a difference.
But some epidemiologists believe the most compelling factor for many who redoubled their efforts to prevent infections may be that they experienced the virus on a personal level. As the pandemic spread to midwestern communities, more people had loved ones, friends, or acquaintances who became ill or died.
“It’s the religion of fox holes: everything becomes much more real when the boy next to you is shot,” said Dr. Christine Petersen, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa. “Suddenly, your local hospital is full and your sister, aunt or grandmother are in the hospital.”
According to COVID Tracking Project data, approximately one in 278 people in all northern states from Wisconsin to Montana needed hospital care for COVID-19. In narrow communities, these experiences come home.
The virus outbreak was so widespread in early November that almost everyone has known someone severely affected by COVID-19, Dr. James Lawler told the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s World Health Security Center.
“It seems like this brings things home in a way I only talked about before,” he said, noting that he noticed that there were more people wearing face masks, in addition to avoiding meetings, parties and indoor dinners. .
Until the fall, the West Midwest had not seen the widespread outbreaks and high mortality rates experienced in other parts of the country during the early months of the pandemic. Many adopted lax approaches to virus mitigation measures. Republican governors in the region shunned government mandates to wear masks or other efforts to prevent infections.
Many health experts warned that the region was ripe for widespread infections, mostly because the weather was getting colder and people were gathering indoors, which facilitated the spread of the coronavirus.
“Once the snowball started, it ended with everyone,” Petersen said. “It simply came to our notice then. They were the ones who took the precautions and doubled what they did a little better, but we knew it would be difficult, no matter what happened ”.
Petersen credited renewed efforts to curb infections to a combination of factors: warnings from health officials and medical workers that hospitals were filling; some Republican governors giving orders to wear masks; and the lived experience of the pandemic. Other experts say some people’s pockets, such as those working in meat packaging plants where infections were widespread, had experienced infection rates so high that the virus has slowed.
But across the region, many worried that success in avoiding a Thanksgiving peak could be undone with the Christmas and New Year celebrations. Petersen was worried that people would have decided to give up Thanksgiving meetings, just to celebrate family celebrations at Christmas. As a Midwesterner, he acknowledged that it was hard to resist the draw to reunite with family during the holidays.
“I hope many of us don’t feel guilty in a few weeks,” he said.
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Funk reported from Norfolk, Nebraska. Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.