South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem got pushback for her decision to let the 880,000 citizens of her state decide on their own whether to follow her suggestions as to social-distancing and other behaviors to fight the coronavirus. On Wednesday she told Breitbart in an exclusive interview that despite her state remaining free of lockdown/shutdown/stay-at-home orders, the significant surge in virus cases projected by various predictive models failed to materialize.

She said:

I think we’ve got maybe 60 people in the hospital right now. We have 2,500 beds set aside for COVID-19 patients, but we only have 63 in [the hospital]….

We already have cut our peak projections by 75 percent just putting in place the recommendations I asked people to do, staying at home and [practicing] social distancing. They’ve washed their hands and they’ve stayed home if they weren’t feeling well and called their doctors.

Just by doing that, we’ve cut the hospitalization rates by 75 percent. So, I’ve just been super proud of what the people in South Dakota have done — they recognized that I wasn’t going to dictate to them, that I valued their freedoms and liberties and that I was going to let them take action on behalf of their families and communities.

When pressed to explain why she didn’t do the popular thing and institute a state-wide shutdown like so many other governors have done, she said:

It was a decision that I made. The facts on the ground here did not support shelter-in-place. We just didn’t have the spread.

For me personally, I took an oath to uphold our state Constitution. I took an oath when I was in Congress [she served in the House from 2011 to 2019] to uphold the United States Constitution. So I believe in people’s freedoms and liberties and I always balance that with every decision that I make as governor.

THE REST AT https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/item/35544-south-dakota-has-flattened-the-curve-without-shutting-down