There’s an excellent treatment in the Strib on how politics and political “competition” bewteen neighboring states (MN and WI) led to the latter neighbor’s exponential growth of positive COVID-19 cases over the former’s more measured approach to prevention of spread. Minnesota is surrounded – literally – by 4 states whose percent positivity rates are among the top ten in the nation, and its current standing in comparison to the COVID surges in the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin may provide insight into how its response is a reflection of the politics of the pandemic. Wisconsin is billed in the piece as a “cautionary tale” for its more earnest neighbor the west – though cases here continue to surge in a similar, but lagging, trajectory – as the novel coronavirus knows no political boundaries.
