Michigan’s increase in COVID-19: What benefit and what cost?

By Steve Gold

Bridge Magazine provides excellent journalism in its ongoing documentation of how the COVID-19 pandemic is playing out in Michigan.  In the June 26 iteration of the magazine (https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-health-watch/coronavirus-tracker-what-michigan-needs-know-now), this Corona Virus Tracker chart appears:

This graphic shows that the seven-day average of new cases has been rising for about eleven days, or since about June 14.  Not coincidentally, that’s two weeks after new cases had bottomed out, and two weeks after the June 1 date on which Gov. Gretchen Whitmer re-opened bars and restaurants with new safety requirements.  The graphic therefore demonstrates that those requirements, as implemented, will not prevent transmission of the virus as effectively as the stay-at-home order did.  If Gov. Whitmer doesn’t pause or reverse the re-opening, new cases will continue to rise. How high remains to be seen.

These events can be viewed as an illustration in real-time of how basic principles of epidemiology manifest themselves in a real-world situation.  It surprises no one with professional training and experience, and no one who has simply been paying attention to the facts rather than the distractions of the political farce in Washington.  The post-reopening increase in cases of COVID-19, and the associated increase in deaths, could have been prevented – were in fact being prevented, and now no longer are.  Note too that persons in nursing homes, who have accounted for about a third of pandemic deaths in Michigan, will probably play a far smaller part in the post-reopening cases and deaths.  They aren’t going to bars and restaurants, or to other re-opened and re-opening businesses.  The new cases are people who, as a group, are less fragile and less ill, and who usually have very low rates of hospitalization or death.

The value Michigan places on the damaged health of those who have fallen ill, and the very lives of those who have died, since the state re-opened, could be measured sardonically but rather precisely as the increased income to businesses and tax revenues to the state.  I wonder who will do that math, and whether it will demonstrate that the policy decision made by Gov. Whitmer and other governors across the country was a wise one or the reverse.

Steve Gold is retired from Macomb County where he served as the county’s first director of Health and Human Services.