DETROIT (CN) — Michigan recently celebrated the grim one-year anniversary of the first cases of Covid-19 detected in the Wolverine State. Since then, more than 610,000 Michiganders have caught the virus and over 15,000 have perished, and with the recent emergence of highly contagious strains the worst might not be over.
An Oakland County resident and Wayne County resident, both who reported traveling internationally, were the first citizens in the state to contract the respiratory disease on March 10, 2020.
Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer immediately declared a state of emergency.
“We are taking every step we can to mitigate the spread of the virus and keep Michiganders safe,” she said in a statement at the time. “I have declared a state of emergency to harness all of our resources across state government to slow the spread of the virus and protect families.”
Cases continued to rise with a peak of around 2,000 new cases a day in early April but flatlined over the summer at about 1,000 cases a day, until October when a massive increase began. The new daily reported cases exploded to around 7,000 per day by November while deaths averaged about 120 a day.
A slow but steady decrease followed through the winter months, but now a spring surge associated with highly contagious new strains of the disease threaten to plunge the state back into the abyss. Cases have increased by 50% over the last week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Almost a year to the day since the first cases in Michigan, the Covid-19 variant B1351, originally detected in South Africa, was recently identified in a Jackson County child on March 9.
Matthew Budd, personal and preventative health service director of the Jackson County Health Department, posted a video on Facebook warning about the new variants and urging people to be vigilant.
“All viruses mutate after time. It’s like playing a game of telephone, where the message ends up being different each time it passes to the next person,” he said.
He added, “Not every test sample collected is tested to see what strain it is. This means there might be additional variant cases in Jackson County and there could be a spread of these variants in our community.”
Dr. Debra Furr-Holden, associate dean for public health integration at Michigan State University, believes another wave is on the way.
“Cases will increase if something doesn’t shift,” she said in a telephone interview. “And I don’t know what that shift would be. With everything starting to open it’s going to be hard to keep pace with the spread.”
She added, “It would not surprise me if where we are the next few weeks becomes the baseline for what it looks like this summer.”
Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, chief medical executive at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, said recently that the spread of a new mutation was inevitable.
“We are concerned about the discovery of another variant in Michigan, although it was not unexpected,” she said in a statement.
“We continue to urge Michiganders to follow a research-based approach by wearing their masks properly, socially distancing, avoiding crowds, washing their hands often, and making a plan to get the safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine once it is their turn,” she added. “We all have a personal responsibility to slow the spread of Covid-19 and end this pandemic as quickly as possible.”
Furr-Holden hopes people do not take anything for granted and stay vigilant, even if they are vaccinated.
“Until we get to that sweet spot of having community case spread of 1-2% and a significant portion of the population vaccinated, that is our best strategy right now to keep the spread down,” she said.