Michigan becomes hot spot as variants rose, vigilance fell

Michigan has become the current national hot spot for coronavirus infections and COVID-19 hospitalizations at a time when more than half the U.S. adult population has been vaccinated and other states have seen the virus diminish substantially.

Doctors, medical professionals and public health officials point to a number of factors that explain how the situation has gotten so bad in Michigan. More contagious variants, especially the mutation first discovered in Britain, have taken root here with greater prevalence than other states. Residents have emerged from harsh, lengthy state restrictions on dining and crowd sizes and abandoned mask wearing and social distancing, especially in rural, northern parts of the state that had largely avoided severe outbreaks. The state has also had average vaccine compliance.

Michigan has recorded a highest-in-the-nation 91,000 new COVID-19 cases over the last two weeks, despite improvements in the numbers in recent days. By comparison, that is more cases than California and Texas had combined in the same period.

Beaumont Health, a major hospital system in Michigan, recently warned that its hospitals and staff had hit critical capacity levels. COVID-19 patient numbers across the eight-hospital health system jumped from 128 on Feb. 28 to more than 800 patients.

Detroit was an early epicenter a year ago when the virus first arrived in the U.S., prompting aggressive measures by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to stop the spread. That made her a target of then-President Donald Trump and right-wing protesters who vilified her as the epitome of government overreach in a year when Michigan played a pivotal role in the presidential election.

Toni Schmittling, a nurse anesthetist who works at Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit, says that when Detroit was hard-hit and her hospital had to double-up ventilator patients in one room, the rest of Michigan was wondering why restrictions were needed.

“We’d say, ‘Are you kidding me, people are dying right and left here,’” Schmittling said.

Now, cases are more spread out and rural areas are getting hit hard. At Sinai-Grace, Beaumont Royal Oak and other hospitals across the U.S., patients are younger than before, in their 30s to 50s, but don’t seem to get quite as sick.

The current surge has left medical staff beleaguered. Unlike their colleagues in other states where the virus is relatively under control, Michigan doctors and nurses are enduring another crisis — more than a full year after hospitals in Detroit were besieged.

COVID’s toll in Michigan has been much more than emergency rooms and ICU departments packed with the ill and thousands of people self-quarantining due to fear of contracting the virus. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost, and Detroit, which is 80% Black and has a high level of poverty, has been especially hard hit by the virus and economic woes.

At the same time, vaccine hesitancy has been an issue in Michigan. About 40% of the state has received at least one vaccine dose — about the same as the national average. About 28% of city residents 16 and older in Detroit have received at least one dose of vaccine. The city is planning to go door-to-door to urge people to get vaccine doses — many of which are manufactured in Michigan at Pfizer’s plant near Kalamazoo.