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... Michigan is home to nine of the 10 metro areas with the country’s highest recent case rates.
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... the public grows impatient with any answers that are not vaccines.
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... on Friday [Gov. Gretchen Whitmer] seemed to try to shift attention to the Biden administration for turning down her request to send extra vaccine doses to her beleaguered state.
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Even many Democrats in Michigan seem to concur that the time for shutting things down might have passed.
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There is no single reason Michigan has been hit so hard in recent weeks...the latest surge has been partly attributed to the B.1.1.7 variant that...is widespread in the state. Recent infections suggest that small social gatherings were driving case increases...Children are also accounting for a higher percentage of cases...
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“It’s hard for me to have hope when I don’t see the basic public health precautions being implemented and sustained,” said Debra Furr-Holden, a Michigan State University epidemiologist whom Ms. Whitmer appointed to the state’s Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities. “...the vaccines will not be able to keep pace.”
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no other state is seeing a similar surge.
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Ms. Whitmer, whose administration rolled back restrictions last month when virus cases were relatively low, pressed President Biden in a Thursday night phone call for extra vaccines to address the surge. Mr. Biden declined, and the administration said on Friday that it would continue allocating vaccines based
on adult population.
A state official with knowledge of the call, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation, said the president expressed concern about loosened restrictions in Michigan but seemed to have inaccurate information about what restrictions remained in place.
