Typical CNN news?

Does anyone other than conservative news outlets ever fact checks CNN? 

Yesterday, across media, a South Dakota nurse by the name of Jodi Doering’s appearance on CNN made waves as she talked about numerous patients who are currently suffering from the virus and denying the virus’s existence while dying horrible deaths from COVID-19 in packed hospitals in South Dakota. The only problem is, the story is likely false and if not, a gross overembellishment of the facts.

Nurse Doering, a Marquette grad and licensed CNP lives in a little town called Woonsocket, SD. Doering’s county in which she lives, Sanborn County has had just one COVID-19 death since the beginning of the pandemic which occurred back in October. The information comes from South Dakota’s COVID-19 statistics website, which provides data from all the different regions and counties in South Dakota and USFacts.org.

Doering doesn’t list a place of employment on her social media pages, but RedState has determined she was an employee of Huron Regional Medical Center, where she has worked, at times, on the COVID-19 unit in the hospital. According to the hospital’s marketing lead, with whom RedState spoke this morning, the hospital has only seen 6 deaths total, since the beginning of the outbreak. That’s compared to 22 deaths total, in the entire county of Beadle, where HRMC is located. Currently, at HRMC, there are only 6 non-critical COVID-19 patients in the hospital, and one in the ICU. There are no patients currently on ventilators, according to the State’s COVID-19 statistics page. Of the 6 deaths identifies, RedState was able to determine that one was the tragic case of a 21-year-old mother of three who passed from the virus back in May. Without revealing the identity of the mother, RedState has determined that she likely was not a patient who denied the existence of the virus. That leaves us with 5 patients that died at the hospital since the beginning of the outbreak, who we cannot identify. RedState was not able to determine whether or not Doering was working at the time of any of the deaths. She could have been there for all 5, or there for none of them. The narrative that Doering appeared to be weaving does is not supported by the facts.

So basically we have a medical professional who is claiming that 6 total deaths since the outbreak is considered "numerous" and that six non-critical patients and one in the ICU is currently overwhelming their hospital system. 

The official South Dakota Department of Health suggests that Covid patients are currently using 21% of all hospital beds and 31% of ICU beds and 11% of the available Ventilators. Including all other patients, South Dakota currently has approximately a third of all of their normal beds and ICU beds available. 

That means that they are at no more than two thirds capacity... which may or may not even be putting any strain on resources.  Yet that doesn't stop people who suggest that they have better information from telling everyone that the hospitals are over their capacity and that death is running rampant. Oh and these facts certainly don't stop CNN and other so called news outlets from repeating false claims.

What would it have taken for CNN to do what a reporter from Red State did, when he called the hospital to verify if the claims of the nurse was true? Well it would have taken some mild curiosity and some feeling that the "truth" was more important than telling the story that they wanted to tell. Unfortunately our news organizations today have little use for the truth or fact.