NewsSportsEntertainmentLifestyleOpinionUSA TODAYObituariesE-EditionLegals
Michigan was warned about British COVID-19 variant, but many ignored it
Tresa Baldas, Detroit Free Press, and Mohar Chatterjee, Derek Kravitz and Bianca Fortis, Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, Columbia Journalism School
Local health departments across Michigan started sounding the alarm months ago.
A deadlier coronavirus variant that had first ravaged Britain was now here — in metro Detroit, at the University of Michigan, a state prison in Ionia and rural counties in the Thumb region — with doctors, nurses and public health officials fully aware.
And yet Michiganders — from state prison employees to small business owners and local officials to parents of high school athletes — ignored medical experts' repeated warnings about the highly infectious variant. They rebuffed stay-in-place recommendations, allowed crowded events to occur and turned a blind eye to defiant behavior, according to thousands of internal health department emails and contact tracing notes from across the state and interviews with those in charge.