Despite continued COVID-19 restrictions, including social distancing, limited capacity inside businesses, and mask mandates, Michigan has more COVID-19 hospitalizations than Texas, which dropped all of its COVID-19 restrictions about one month ago.
Associated Press reporter David Eggert attended a ceremony at Ford Field on Tuesday where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was vaccinated. He reported that the state has 3,100 hospitalizations for COVID-19, an increase from 2,600 last Friday.
Dr. Khaldun says 3,100 people are hospitalized with COVID-19. That's up 500 from Friday.
— David Eggert (@DavidEggert00) April 6, 2021
As Michigan’s hospitalizations trend upward, Texas’ trend downward.
“There were 2,817 people in state hospitals with the disease Saturday, the most recent day for which data is available,” NBC’s Dallas-Fort Worth affiliate reported. “That’s the fewest since June of last year.”
That, despite the fact that Texas is totally reopened for business, and has a population of nearly 30 million, which is almost three times larger than Michigan’s population of about 10 million.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s unofficial COVID-19 czar, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, has presided over the pandemic throughout its entirety.
Whitmer apparently worships Fauci. She recently appeared in a nationally-broadcasted interview with a pillow featuring Fauci’s face proudly displayed behind her.
But in a Tuesday interview on MSNBC, Fauci could not explain why, despite ignoring his guidelines, Texas has seen a dramatic drop in cases since it lifted all restrictions last month.
“It can be confusing, because you may see a lag and a delay, because often you have to wait a few weeks before you see the effect of what you’re doing right now,” Fauci said. “You know, there are a lot of things that go into that. I mean, when you say that they’ve had a lot of activity on the outside like ballgames… I’m not really quite sure. It could be they’re doing things outdoors. You know, it’s very difficult to just one on one compare that. You just have to see in the long range. ”
Fauci added that he hopes Texas’ cases continue to decline.
Whitmer levied some of the strictest COVID-19 lockdown orders in America, including a ban on private gatherings, until she was stripped of her emergency powers by the Michigan Supreme Court. She has continued to run the state’s COVID-19 response through the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), an executive branch agency. When the legislature passed a bill to curb that agency’s emergency powers – a bill that would have forced the agency to purge any emergency mandate after 28 days unless the legislature voted to keep the mandate in effect – Whitmer vetoed the bill.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Michigan Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
