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Has Michigan Finally Solved Its COVID-19 Testing Issues?
Michigan’s biggest flaw in handling the COVID-19 pandemic has been its poor testing rate.
Now, just when it looked like that rate might delay any chance of a safe reopening, they may have gotten the stalled testing program into gear.
For more than a month, as Michigan’s death toll climbed higher than any state outside the New York metropolitan area, the state couldn’t even match the anemic national testing rate.
This week, after more than 3,000 deaths,that may have finally changed. On April 22–23, the state carried out 15,523 tests — their highest two-day total since the pandemic began. On the 22nd, there were 7,368, surpassing the previous high of 7,308 on Monday, March 30, and that jumped to 8,155 on the 23rd.
Michigan’s goal is twice that level — on Friday, a release from the state health department cited a Harvard study calling for more 15,000 tests a day before the state could safely reopen.
“MDHHS would like to see 15,000 tests completed daily in Michigan per recommendations by the Harvard Global Health Institute, which published a recommendation of 152 tests per day per 100,000 population to begin to re-open the United States. That level of testing is necessary to identify…
