It took 13 days for COVID-19 cases to climb from one to 80 at the Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls.
Two days later, those cases reached 190. A week later, the number of infections broke 900. Two more days, they surpassed 1,000.
The public only saw cases climb for half that time, since the company and city kept the case numbers under wraps for the first two weeks.
Workers died, people protested and the national media swarmed.
Then the plant shut down. This was all in the span of just a few weeks.
A year later, it seems impossible that the meatpacking plant became the epicenter of an outbreak of more than 1,000 workers and national attention in such a short amount of time.