Michigan Shows Why Managing The COVID-19 Endgame Is So Hard
Americans are really quite done with the pandemic, but it s not over yet.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmerresponded to her state’s soaringCOVID-19 caseloads on Friday by calling for a two-week, voluntary return to more social distancing. “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said, highlighting the state’s progress at vaccination. “I want to get back to normal as much as everyone.”
The steps are Whitmer’s first major actions since the state became the epicenter of a new COVID-19 wave spreading through parts of the U.S. No state has more people getting sick with the coronavirus every day. Crowded inpatient facilities are forcing hospitals to delay elective surgeries again.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
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WASHINGTON Amid Michigan’s worst-in-the-nation coronavirus surge, scientists and public health officials are urging the Biden administration to flood the state with additional vaccine doses.
So far, though, their plea has fallen on deaf ears. Instead, the federal government is sticking to a vaccine-allocation strategy that largely awards doses to states and territories based on their population. As a result, most jurisdictions are still receiving similar per-capita vaccine supplies, regardless of how many people there are getting sick or how many excess vaccine doses they have.
Experts have cast a surge in Michigan’s vaccine supply as a critical tool in combating the state’s most recent Covid-19 crisis. The state is currently recording nearly 7,000 new cases per day, just shy of its all-time peak in December. Hospitalizations and deaths, which tend to lag a few weeks behind increasing case
Doubling Michigan s vaccine supply could prevent 1,200 deaths - but Biden administration is not sending the state surge shipments
A University of California, Berkeley model estimates how many hospital admissions and deaths could be avoided with more vaccines and restrictions
If vaccine shipments to Michigan were doubled, 10,000 fewer people would be admitted to hospitals there and 1,200 fewer people would die
Coupling this with a pause on reopenings could cut hospital admissions by 23,000 and deaths by 2,500 between April 3 to July 1
Currently, Michigan is getting fewer doses per people in its population than states like South Dakota and Oklahoma which are not seeing case surges
Nearly half of country s new COVID-19 infections are in just 5 states Share Updated: 8:57 PM EDT Apr 6, 2021 RUSS BYNUM and MICHELLE R. SMITH
Nearly half of country s new COVID-19 infections are in just 5 states Share Updated: 8:57 PM EDT Apr 6, 2021
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Show Transcript it s inching up from 30,000 to 40,000 to 60,000 day. If it really takes a turn and start surging up, that s what we would consider. We re really on the brink of a surge. That s why I mean, it s really a critical time right now because we could just as easily swing up into a surge that would be a setback for public health. But that would be a psychological setback to because people are really have what we call covid 19 fatigue, and we just don t want to have to go back to really shutting things down. That would be terrible. But importantly, you have a societal responsibility because even if you get infected and don t get seriously ill, you are still propagating t
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