Chinese Flu: North Dakota Update -- October 17, 2020

Link to the Covid-19 worldometer data base.

Set the filter to "yesterday."

Click on the ninth column, deaths/million population, and make sure you have "most" to "least."

Then scroll down until you find North Dakota and South Dakota.

At the moment, ranked by deaths per capita:

• North Dakota is ranked #23 (above [worse than] California, Minnesota, Washington state, and 24 other states and DC
• South Dakota is ranked #34

I don't know what that means. Good, bad, indifferent, it is what it is.

But when I first started looking at these numbers back in August, for deaths per capita, the rankings:

• North Dakota was ranked #41; and,
• South Dakota was ranked #40.

So, in the space of less than two months, the Dakotas have moved up the list (bad) from around 40 (only ten states worse than the Dakotas) to around 23 for North Dakota, or worse than 28 other states and DC.

And then look at this, from August 26, 2020:

Total deaths in:

• Fargo: 76
• Bismarck: 13
• Mandan: 5
• core Bakken (four counties): 5
  

Now, look at the same graphic from October 12, 2020, just a couple of days ago:

• Fargo: 78 deaths
• Bismarck: 63 deaths
• Mandan: 43 deaths
• core Bakken (four counties): 21
  

Assuming the data is "somewhat" accurate and that there are no typos, I have just one question: what is going on in Bismarck/Mandan?

In the past two months, Fargo's total number of deaths has gone from 76 to 78.

In that same time period, Bismarck-Mandan has gone from 18 to 106.

And interestingly, The Bismarck Tribune, which tweets almost everything under the sun, has never tweeted this data point. At least I've never seen it over at twitter. 

I see Dickinson went from six to twenty-five in that same time frame. Watford City, the heart of the Bakken, went from two to three. I assume most of the seriously ill in Watford City and Dickinson are being flown to Bismarck. I assume the seriously ill in the eastern third / eastern half of the state are being flown to Fargo or Grand Forks. Minot went from one to twenty, suggesting a lot of seriously ill are being flown to Minot.

I won't even get started on the color-coded legend. 

Maybe I'm misreading something and if I am I will have egg on my face, as they say, but the charts seem to be pretty straightforward.