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This Is How Gretchen Whitmer’s Plan Can Save Michigan
“That woman from Michigan” is succeeding despite the President’s sabotage attempts
Donald Trump can’t stand Gretchen Whitmer.
Like New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Washington’s Jay Inslee, the Michigan governor has focused on saving lives instead of rushing people back to work. That’s helped turn the state into one of the country’s COVID-19 success stories.
Despite terrible early losses, Michigan has already reached the third stage of Whitmer’s six-step reopening plan. It could move to Stage 4 by the end of May.
Detroit’s early battles
That’s not how it looked for the first six weeks of the crisis. The Detroit area had one of the nation’s first four significant outbreaks, along with New York City, Seattle, and New Orleans.
Most of Michigan avoided intense infection levels — four counties in the Upper Peninsula have not had a single recorded case. However, the southeastern corner, centered on Detroit, is populated densely enough to overwhelm low numbers elsewhere.
For much of April, the state was third in the nation in deaths and among the top five in cases. They’ve now fallen to fourth in deaths and seventh in confirmed cases.
However, they still have the highest case fatality rate in the nation, with 9.6 deaths per 100 confirmed cases.
It’s not just deaths
Looking only at death rates, the state’s recovery seems unclear. A chart of daily deaths looks more like an EKG than a steady decline. However, that’s misleading. The Michigan Department of Health is continuously reviewing death certificates in an attempt to categorize coronavirus cases correctly. Any discoveries are added to the state’s count on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
For example, the daily announcement on Saturday, May 8, showed 133 deaths, but fewer than half (66) were new reports. The rest were reclassified cases from previous deaths.
If you smooth out the data using a rolling average, the state had a flat peak of around 140 deaths from April 15–28. That has fallen into the 60s in the first week of May.