Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been heavily criticized for her excessive restrictions and repeated power grabs, and rightfully so. (Granted, her response to the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t been all bad — as I wrote, she was wise to exempt places of worship from her shelter-in-place orders.) But one policy that deserves more attention due to its immediate and devastating costs is Whitmer’s executive order requiring nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients.
On April 15, Whitmer signed an order mandating that nursing homes and other long-term care facilities accept COVID-19 patients from nearby hospitals. If a nursing home’s occupancy is at 80% or more of its capacity, it must refer coronavirus patients to a “regional hub” or another long-term care facility with additional rooms and resources.
The purpose of the policy was to free up room in hospitals and prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. But Whitmer’s order effectively turned the state’s nursing homes into breeding grounds, exposing hundreds of vulnerable residents to the virus. It’s no coincidence that 30% of Michigan’s COVID-19 deaths occurred in populous nursing homes.
That number is probably much higher, but Michigan officials refuse to require nursing homes to report coronavirus deaths publicly. Not only does this leave friends and family members in the dark, but it also makes it impossible for the state to track COVID-19 cases within nursing homes adequately, since officials are only receiving information that the homes have seen fit to deliver.
The state has even admitted that it doesn’t know how many Michiganders have contracted the coronavirus within nursing homes. A local Detroit news station, however, was able to obtain data from Detroit’s health department, as well as the health departments of the three counties in metropolitan Detroit (the state’s most populous): Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb. The numbers are devastating.
Detroit alone has had more than 10,000 positive cases and 307 deaths within its nursing homes. Macomb County has had 277 deaths, Oakland County has had 459 deaths, and Wayne County has had 421 deaths.
Nursing homes were supposed to create units for COVID-19 residents to help limit the outbreak within the facilities, according to Whitmer’s order. But one worker at a Detroit nursing home told Bridge Magazine that staff members were not even given personal protective equipment, nor were they told which residents had tested positive and which ones had not. The nursing home certainly deserves the principle share of blame for the failure in this case, but the fact is that this nursing home shouldn’t have been forced to deal with coronavirus cases in the first place.
Michigan’s state Senate Oversight Committee has promised to conduct a thorough investigation into Whitmer’s policy and just how much damage it caused. This is a necessary step: We might not have known much about the coronavirus back in late February and early March, but we did at least know that our elderly population would be more susceptible to the virus than others. With that in mind, Whitmer should have done everything in her power to shield the state’s most vulnerable from COVID-19.
Instead, Whitmer sent COVID-19 directly into Michigan’s nursing homes. The devastating death toll lies on her doorstep.
