Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer responded to her state’s soaring COVID-19 caseloads on Friday by calling for a two-week, voluntary return to more social distancing. “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said, highlighting the state’s progress at vaccination. “I want to get back to normal as much as everyone.”
The steps are Whitmer’s first major actions since the state became the epicenter of a new COVID-19 wave spreading through parts of the U.S. No state has more people getting sick with the coronavirus every day. Crowded inpatient facilities are forcing hospitals to delay elective surgeries again.
In one desperate tweet on Thursday, Justin Dimick, chairman of the University of Michigan’s surgery department, wrote that his facility was among those starting to postpone procedures: “Bars and restaurants are open. People are out and about. No new restrictions. We need help.”
But while Whitmer urged residents to avoid indoor dining and asked school districts to suspend both in-person high school learning and after-school sports for the two-week period, she declined to issue new orders in either case. It’s a less aggressive move than many public health experts had been urging, even as she faces ongoing, relentless calls from Republicans and their allies to dial back restrictions even more.
It’s not a new situation. Whitmer’s management of the pandemic last year won widespread acclaim and vaulted her onto the national stage. One reason was her determination to champion public health in the face of unrelenting attacks from President Donald Trump and his allies ― not to mention a plot on her life that the FBI said it foiled.
But in January, her secretary of health and human services, Robert Gordon, abruptly resigned on the same day the state began reopening restaurants for in-person dining. Internal emails, which The Detroit News later obtained, showed Gordon was worried the plan went too far, given the threat of new coronavirus variants. Experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci have since said Michigan may have reopened too hastily.
Whitmer, who consults regularly with top health researchers from the state and around the country, has almost certainly heard similar things in private. Friday’s announcement suggests that she is trying to walk a fine line between following public health guidance and recognizing that her constituents, even the politically sympathetic ones, have lost their patience for pandemic restrictions.
Of course, that is precisely the problem now all over the country: Many Americans are ready to move on from the virus, but the pandemic isn’t over just yet. It’s a difficult situation to manage, especially in such a politically polarized environment. But lives are literally at stake.
Why Michigan Is In Trouble
Michigan was among the states where B.117, a British variant, first appeared. It has been spreading quickly among the groups not yet vaccinated, which is mostly younger and more socially active people. It is a big reason for the state’s problems, although not the only one.
“I honestly think it’s a little of everything ― variants, plus increased mobility and reduced precautions on an individual level,” Emily Martin, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told HuffPost. “We have really the first large-scale movement of the virus through age groups that we’ve managed to keep relatively protected thus far, which means there are a huge number of susceptible people still to be infected.”
Michigan may also be a victim of its own past success, some researchers have speculated. “Michigan did so well in the last surge that I actually think part of it is that they may just have more vulnerable people and a lower level of population immunity than many other states,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
That success is in no small part thanks to Whitmer, who early in the pandemic scrambled to acquire personal protective gear when it wasn’t coming from the federal government and ordered full shutdowns of activity when it was still controversial to do so.
Detroit was among the first metropolitan areas that the virus hit last year and, for a few weeks, its health care facilities were on the edge of being completely overrun. But the crisis never reached New York City levels, and Michigan similarly avoided the dire numbers of some other places during the second surge of the virus.
Overall, Michigan’s per capita death rate is close to the national average, which represents an accomplishment given Michigan’s exposure early in the pandemic, when medical science was still struggling to understand the virus. But from the get-go, Whitmer faced a sharp backlash from Trump, who didn’t take kindly to her public criticisms of his erratic, frequently indifferent crisis management, as well as from anti-restriction Michiganders, some of whom defied her orders openly.
The critics never represented a majority of Whitmer’s constituents. On the contrary, she has enjoyed majority support throughout the crisis, and her poll numbers actually went up a bit. But the loud, angry protests came awfully close to the kind of violence that hit the U.S. Capitol in January, following the presidential election, and drew from some of the same crowds.
Meanwhile, Republicans have used their gerrymandered control of the Michigan Legislature to undermine Whitmer’s authority. They also sued to strip her of emergency powers. Their victory, at the hands of conservative justices who at the time were a majority on the state Supreme Court, forced her to issue public health orders through the state Department of Health and Human Services, which has its own legal authority.
