My friend's mom was just admitted to a hospital on the East side of Michigan with really, really bad Covid. Opening day for baseball is today, cases are surging like crazy and everyone is just pretending like it's over. I hope that things improve in 6 weeks, but I'm really pessimistic at the moment.
Yeah, it will eventually get better, but I have family who are physicians who are swamped again and friends with relatives in ERs and ICUs.. Hard to be too optimistic at the moment. NYTimes' latest concurs;
> Michigan has more recent cases per capita than any other state, and has seen them soar in recent weeks, to more than 5,600 cases a day from about 1,000 on Feb. 21. The nation’s top five metro areas in recent cases per capita are all in Michigan: Jackson, Detroit, Flint, Lansing and Monroe.
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> Health officials partly attributed the rapid rise in cases to the B.1.1.7 variant that was originally identified in Britain and is widespread in Michigan. But they have also observed a broader return to prepandemic life seen in a relaxing of mask wearing, social distancing and other strategies meant to slow the spread of the virus — many weeks before a substantial portion of the population is vaccinated. On Thursday, Michigan officials announced that they had identified their first case of the P.1 variant, which has spread widely in Brazil and has now been found in more than 20 U.S. states.
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> Dr. Joneigh S. Khaldun, the state’s chief medical executive, said on Tuesday that 50 percent of state residents over 65 were fully vaccinated, a sign of progress that the most vulnerable population is closer to protection from Covid-19.
> But she said the most significant increase in hospitalizations in the state is in people in their 50s, a group still at risk of becoming severely ill or dying from Covid-19. Younger people have driven the rapid increase in cases recently, she said, including high school students who participate in sports and have contracted the virus through those activities.
