In Michigan, the daily new cases are up pretty dramatically from mid-January.
In early 2020, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer probably ranked only second to Andrew Cuomo in terms of glowing national press coverage. She even rated her own prayer candle. Nutjob militia types seemed to deem her public enemy No. 1.
Those less inclined to give Whitmer the benefit of the doubt noticed her bonkers executive order, declaring stores of more than 50,000 feet must close areas of the store that sell carpet or flooring, furniture, garden centers or plant nurseries, or paint, her confusing and contradictory executive orders on what was permitted during lockdown, her decision to violate her own social-distancing orders, her blatantly unconstitutional proposals for a presidentially mandated national mask-wearing requirement, the state supreme court determining her lockdown restriction orders were unconstitutional, the state hiring a Democratic campaign data firm to track coronavirus cases, her declaration that “abortion is life-sustaining,” and her husband asking for special treatment on his boat.
And like Cuomo, Whitmer issued an executive order instructing nursing homes and other similar facilities to take on hospital patients with COVID-19. More than 5,500 of Michigan’s deaths from COVID-19 have come in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, out of 16,932 so far.
Add all that up, and Whitmer looks less like a rising star and more like another example of a Democratic governor with a laughably ridiculous media-hype-to-results ratio.
As for those results, Whitmer can point to Michigan ranking ninth-lowest cases-per-million-residents in the country, and ranking 21st in deaths-per-million residents. The state’s vaccination program is around the middle of the pack in terms of the percentage of residents given one dose, the percentage of residents fully vaccinated. As of this morning, Michigan has used 75.3 percent of its allocated vaccine doses, ranking it a subpar 38th out of the 50 states.
But something odd is going on in Michigan in the past few weeks. Nationwide, new cases steadily declined from January to early March, and they’ve remained pretty level this month, while daily new deaths have continued a steady decline from January. But in Michigan, the daily new cases are up pretty dramatically from mid-January, and the state’s active cases increased from 88,716 on the last day of February to 121,627 yesterday. Hospitalization and ICU use have climbed as well, but thankfully, the state’s daily new death rate has slightly declined during that period.
Some folks might point the finger at Whitmer and the state loosening some restrictions in early March, except that the rise in cases predates the changes taking effect, or even the announcement of upcoming changes in policy. Some are attributing it to the reopening of schools — at the beginning of the year, Whitmer urged Michigan schools to offer all K–12 students an option of returning to classrooms by March 1 — but the state’s data tracking attributes about 350 of the new cases to school students or staff.
A recent article about Michigan in the U.K. Guardian lamented, “about 60 percent of Michiganders aged 65 years old and up have received at least one dose, representing a bright spot in the rollout. However, most children still aren’t receiving the vaccination.” But that’s not some odd state policy; the vaccines are only approved for those 16 and up.
That leaves new variants as a potential explanation, and Michigan and Florida rank highest in the number of confirmed cases of the B117 variant, according to the CDC. It may just be that Michigan has the awful luck of being stuck with an outbreak of one the more contagious variants and a mediocre-to-subpar vaccination effort. (Detroit, considered separately from Wayne County, in which it is located, has vaccinated 16.5 percent of its residents, while the surrounding counties, including the rest of Wayne County, have vaccinated 21 percent to nearly 33 percent of their residents.) And this isn’t even getting into the problem of idiot mayors who turn down certain brands of vaccines because they like the other ones better.