Michigan Losing Covid Race as Cases Outstrip Vaccines’ Reach Bloomberg 8 hrs ago David Welch
(Bloomberg) Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who once enacted some of the toughest restrictions in the U.S. to slow the spread of Covid-19, is letting restaurants, bars and school activities remain open even as the virus grows faster in her state than any other.
Whitmer has sped up vaccinations, but a variant-driven spread is putting pressure on her to reinstate the kind of restrictions that last year prompted lawsuits some successful to curb the governor’s powers. It also led to armed protesters swarming the State Capitol in Lansing and a foiled attempt to kidnap her.
The top surgeon at Michigan Medicine expressed alarm Thursday over rising COVID-19 infections, begging for intervention from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Justin Dimick, chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan, tweeted the Ann Arbor-based health system was canceling surgeries due to the intake of COVID-19 patients.
He noted there had been no recently imposed restrictions to combat the spread of the virus and pleaded for help from Whitmer, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt. We are starting to cancel surgical cases again to accommodate rapidly accelerating Covid-19 admissions. Entire state is high-risk, Dimick tweeted.