“To dance the bamba you need a little grace
A little grace for me, for you, up and up
And up and up, for you, I will be
For you I will be, for you I will be.”
“La Bamba” - Ritchie Valens

Oh, those aren’t the lyrics you grew up with to Valens’ classic tune?

Of course, those are the translated lyrics to his 1958 rock/dance hit that made Valens a national celebrity, so much so that he was invited to perform on tour with top artists of the time, Buddy Holly and “The Big Bopper,” all of whom would tragically die in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa in February 1959.

Whether you know the actual lyrics to “La Bamba” or simply enjoy dancing to the beat, if someone began singing the lyrics above, they would be immediately recognizable as out of place.

So much has changed in the last 22 months. To be accurate, as of the printing of this column, it has been 682 days, or 1 year, 10 months, 11 days, OR 22 months and 11 days - however you want to look at it - since the first diagnosed case of COVID-19 in Beadle County.

What has changed significantly over that time, from the view of someone reporting on COVID throughout the pandemic, is the view of the virus.

A lot of that simply has to do with misunderstanding the words that go with the reports around SARS-COV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, and if that’s my fault as the person that reports it, I intend to attempt to clarify that here.

Some have been confused by the recent uptick of new cases since the first of the year.

“The new variant allows for more people to get re-infected after they’ve been infected once, so that’s why numbers are so high!”

I’ve heard some variation of that comment in the community more than once, and it’s simply not the case.

The new positive cases that are reported from the South Dakota Department of Health (DOH) in their reports are only those who test positive and have never tested positive for the virus previously.

For example, I tested positive with COVID in October 2020. If I were to test positive for the virus again, I would not appear on the DOH report as a new positive case.

This is also true of recovered cases and active cases. So, in the example of me testing positive for a second time, I could be actively positive, but I would not show up as an active case in the county.

When discussing this with a DOH staff member recently, he recognized that the number of actual active cases in the state and county are “significantly higher” than have been reported for that reason alone.

Another point to clarify in the numbers is the recovered cases. In late October 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed its rules regarding recording recovered cases, allowing states to report a positive case as recovered 10 days after it has been confirmed positive.

There have been some tweaks to that rule, but in general, states do not have to have any confirmation that the positive case is better, recovered or even alive to show the person as recovered in the number count.

This has led to active numbers being off, due to persons who are still infectious and may still be struggling to recover from an infection, declared recovered by DOH for numerical purposes, taking that person off the active infections.

The final point of clarification is in a pair of numbers that get reported by DOH.

The deaths and hospitalizations reported by the DOH have now undergone two numerical audits and will undergo a third audit this spring.

The reporting of deaths and hospitalizations due to COVID has been politicized significantly, but the DOH has received some of the highest grades for accuracy of reporting in COVID data during the course of the pandemic, with a significant audit last spring removing a portion of hospitalizations at that time, but the same audit not changing the total fatalities in the state.

The major thing to know from the DOH end on hospitalizations and deaths is that for a hospitalization or a death to show up in the record, it is supposed to be significantly influenced by the presence of COVID-19 in the system.

In other words, without COVID-19, the person would not be in the hospital or would not have passed away.

The reported deaths in the state and locally due to the virus are still considered to be underreported because in order for those to be posted to the DOH website, the deceased must be tested for COVID-19 and a medical authority (doctor, coroner, etc.) must determine that the death was due to the influence of COVID-19.

This is why a death that appears in the newspaper’s obituaries may take more than a week to appear in the state’s numbers before it is fully confirmed.

That system has allowed for the state to avoid putting in deaths that were not truly attributable to COVID, but if a family chooses not to have an autopsy done on someone who had not been in the hospital, it is very feasible that a person could pass away due to COVID complications without that being reported to the state. How many of those cases are out there is something that DOH is not willing to put any number on.

Variant B.1.1.529, also known as Omnicron, has only been confirmed in 112 cases as of Jan. 20, but the influence of the more transmissible variants in the state is clear in the skyrocketing numbers across the state.

While there are many who can provide an interpretation of the raw numbers and the trends and what those mean, it’s always good to know what those raw numbers truly are to interpret on your own.

The numbers by DOH are like that original language version of “La Bamba.”

You can certainly interpret them, but it does require understanding the original first.