Michigan seeing an ‘alarming’ case spike

Surge dimming hopes for a quick end to pandemic

DETROIT — In a rural stretch of Michigan along the shore of Lake Huron, coronavirus outbreaks are ripping through churches, schools and restaurants. For more than a week, ambulances have taken several hourlong trips each day to rush severely ill coronavirus patients to hospitals in Detroit, Saginaw or Port Huron, where beds in intensive care units await.

Even as the pandemic appears to be waning in some parts of the United States, Michigan is in the throes of a coronavirus outbreak that’s one of the largest and most alarming in the country. Infection levels have exploded in recent weeks, in big cities and rural stretches alike.

Ann Hepfer, a health officer for two

counties, is racked by worries: about families returning from spring break trips and about the Easter gatherings that will take place this weekend, when families are fresh off their travels out of state.

“It makes me shudder,” she said. “I never thought we would see this at this time. I thought we would be over the hump.”

Michigan has more recent cases per capita than any other state and has seen them soar in recent weeks, to more than 5,300 cases a day from about 1,000 on Feb. 21. The nation’s top three metro areas in recent cases per capita are all in Michigan: Jackson, Detroit and Flint.

“It is absolutely alarming,” Emily Toth Martin, a virus researcher at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, said this week. “Looking at numbers yesterday felt like a gut punch. We’re going to have to go through this surge, and all this hard work again, to get the numbers down.”

Americans have entered a disconcerting phase of the coronavirus pandemic.

They’re surrounded by news that brings hope: More than 2.8 million vaccines are being administered every day on average, the country is fast approaching vaccine eligibility for all adults, and a vaccine trial in adolescents has been a spectacular success.

The U.S. moved closer Thursday toward vaccinating 100 million Americans, with more than 99 million people having received at least one dose of the vaccine. More than 56 million people — 17 percent of the nation’s population — have been fully vaccinated.

A total of 154 million vaccines had been administered as of Thursday, well on the way to meeting President Joe Biden’s new goal of giving 200 million vaccine doses during his first 100 days in office.

Yet the uplifting developments have been tempered by increasingly ominous warnings about the national picture from public health officials.

On Monday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she felt a sense of “impending doom” about a potential new surge in cases. Biden said states should pause their reopening efforts, warning that the country was “giving up hardfought, hard-won gains.”

Cases, deaths and hospitalizations remain well below the peak levels seen in January. But infection numbers have started rising again, to about 66,000 a day, fueled mostly by pervasive outbreaks on the East Coast and in the Upper Midwest.

If any place offers a glimpse at the threat of a new surge, it’s Michigan.

Health officials partly attributed the rapid rise in cases to the B.1.1.7 variant that was originally identified in Britain and is widespread in Michigan. But they also have observed a broader return to pre-pandemic life seen in a relaxing of mask wearing, social distancing and other strategies meant to slow the spread of the virus — many weeks before a substantial portion of the population is vaccinated.

More than 2,200 coronavirus patients statewide are hospitalized, a figure that has more than doubled since the beginning of March. Five hospitals in the Henry Ford system in the Detroit area had a total of 75 coronavirus patients during the week of March 8; as of Tuesday, the hospitals were up to 267 patients.

On Monday, the health system announced it would reinstate a policy limiting visitors at several hospitals in response to the latest surge.

Dr. Adnan Munkarah, chief clinical officer for the Henry Ford Health System, said more coronavirus patients are surviving the disease now than in 2020, in part because they’re skewing younger.

But he’s frustrated, he said, and his staff is exhausted.

“We were hoping that by now we would have things under better control,” he said.