3 June 2021: Michigan Official Confirms Count of COVID Nursing Home Deaths in State Is Incomplete

Michigan health chief: COVID death count in long-term facilities may be ‘low’

Michigan's top public health official is acknowledging the state's offiical count of the total number of COVID deaths at nursing homes is incomplete.

Health and Human Services Director Elizabeth Hertel told lawmakers that 38 of 311 long-term care facilities statewide have not reported COVID-19 deaths as required, while the state didn’t require deaths to be reported at facilities that serve 12 or fewer residents.

Her testimony before the House Oversight Committee followed months of scrutiny from Republicans over Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s handling of COVID cases at senior facilities.

But Hertel stood by the state’s total of deaths in nursing homes, which are licensed by the state and have drawn controversy because of Whitmer’s decision early in the pandemic to use some as “hubs” for recovering COVID patients.

“What the nursing homes are reporting are accurate,” Hertel said, adding they had no “reason or incentive to hide (deaths).”

That statement doesn't tell the whole story however. Much like how New York's Governor Cuomo purposefully hid the full extent of COVID deaths among nursing home residents in his state, Michigan's official count of nursing home resident COVID deaths does not include many of those residents who became ill from COVID and were transferred to hospital before dying. A recent independent analysis of a sample of the state's death certificate data indicates Michigan's COVID death toll for its nursing home residents could be 40% higher than its official figures indicate.

Steve Delie, an attorney for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, filed a lawsuit to secure the COVID-19 records from the state on behalf of a Michigan-based podcast, No BS News Hour.

He told lawmakers Thursday that the records he received in the suit made it clear the state wasn’t counting all long-term care deaths, including those at smaller facilities. He asked the committee to get a list of all deaths and compare it with the list of all long-term care facilities.

“The people of the state of Michigan deserve to know who died and where,” Delie said.

Michigan's undercount of the full extent of COVID deaths among the state's nursing home residents appears to be the result of inadequate data collection standards and lax policy enforcement for reporting these deaths by the state's public health officials. That makes Michigan's situation very different from New York, where the state's Department of Health collected the data, which was subsequently covered up by Cuomo administration officials to hide the full extent of COVID deaths among New York nursing home residents. By contrast, Michigan's officials have fully reported data they are now acknowledging is incomplete.

An audit of death records in Michigan will be needed to establish how many of the state's nursing home residents died from COVID-19.