Residents of South Dakota threw a parade to honor their Republican governor who refused to implement a stay-at-home order on the state.
Governor Kristi Noem tweeted a video of the parade, saying that she is “so blessed to serve the people of the great State of South Dakota.”
“You folks made my day!” she added.
I am so blessed to serve the people of the great State of South Dakota. You folks made my day! pic.twitter.com/oy0e5KO9RZ
— Governor Kristi Noem (@govkristinoem) April 28, 2020
In the video she posted on Monday, cars could be heard honking as emergency vehicles blared their sirens in her honor.
“It’s a parade for you. Wave to ’em!” a woman can be heard telling the governor.
Governor Noem has taken heat for her refusal to order people to stay home, though she has limited some gatherings and banned eating at restaurants.
“I think we’ve got maybe 60 people in the hospital right now,” Noem said last week in an interview with Breitbart. “We have 2,500 beds set aside for COVID-19 patients, but we only have 63 in. We probably, from all of our projections and studying the science behind the virus, we won’t peak until the middle of June. But we already have done much better than what we had thought would have been hitting our state already.”
She added that she values freedom and liberty too much to infringe on her constituents rights.
“We already have cut our peak projections by 75% just putting in place the recommendations I asked people to do, staying at home, and they’ve practiced social distancing,” Noem said. “They’ve washed their hands, and they stayed home if they weren’t feeling well and called their doctors. Just by doing that, we’ve cut the hospitalization rates by 75%. 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.”