This timeline entry presents two opinion pieces appearing in smaller Michigan news outlets. One is an op-ed by a state representative, the other is an editorial.
- Michigan’s nursing home death numbers remain under scrutiny
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Michigan state representative Greg Markkanen (R-Hancock) has an op-ed in the Iron Mountain Daily News addressing the findings of Michigan's Auditor General that the Whitmer administration grossly undercounted nursing home deaths in the state. Like New York's Andrew M. Cuomo, Governor Gretchen Whitmer imposed a version of Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive forcing nursing homes in the state to admit COVID patients. In the following excerpt, he describes how the Whitmer administration's failures in compiling COVID death data from the state's nursing homes and long term care facilities has created a new scandal - one which served to hide the full extent of COVID deaths occurring in these facilities while her version of Cuomo's deadly directive was in effect:
Overall, the numbers DHHS have for COVID-19 deaths in long-term care facilities is 30% lower than what the Auditor General found.
This is a significant difference — and one that could have shaped a better strategy for our most vulnerable if more effort had been made to get more accurate numbers. In a recent joint House-Senate Oversight Committee hearing, DHHS downplayed and disputed this difference. The department’s director stated they only had information to go on from long-term care facilities that were reporting and trusted those numbers when they provided them to the public.
That’s government-speak for doing the absolute bare minimum. And the blunt solution is to pick up the phone and call a few people. The Auditor General managed to identify 923 deaths from facilities that were not required to self-report COVID-19 deaths to the department. A number that high going virtually unnoticed by the administration – and little attempt being made to verify numbers that were available for public consumption — is staggering. The department’s attempts to discredit the review was yet another case of how the governor and her agencies have operated during this pandemic: follow the data when it suits you and flush it when it refutes you.
Not counting COVID nursing home deaths makes Michigan's case different from New York's, where the Cuomo administration counted the deaths, but manipulated it to conceal the full extent of nursing home deaths. If you think of concealing the full extent of nursing home deaths as the outcome desired by state officials, Michigan's approach involved a lot less work on their part....
- Not counting nursing home deaths unacceptable
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We're presenting this editorial in full because it covers how the Whitmer administration's COVID nursing home deaths undercounting scandal was initially discovered and makes a number of essential points about how the Whitmer administration is addressing its undercount after it has been confirmed.
Numbers matter, especially when policymakers’ decisions have life or death consequences.
That’s precisely why we waited in anticipation of the release of a Michigan Auditor General’s report that determined state public health officials undercounted the number of people who died in nursing homes during the first year of the pandemic.
That report, months in the making, determined state public health officials didn’t include 2,386 COVID-19 deaths in the state’s fleet of smaller long-term care facilities in their ongoing assessment of the virus’ impact.
We’re frustrated the report followed more than half a year after a Record-Eagle reporter – through an enormous amount of public records footwork – pinpointed the data deficiency. It’s frustrating because our reporting alerted officials at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to a blind spot in their numbers, a void that likely veiled both deaths and illnesses from public accountings of the pandemic’s human toll in our state.
It’s frustrating because outsiders like us noticed the gap, raised alarm, and the people overseeing the count took no discernible action to fix the flaw or collect the information.
Instead they claimed local health departments were tracking those small care operations. We checked, they weren’t.
By the spring of 2021, when Reporter Mardi Link pinpointed the problem, most of us (journalists especially) had become pretty skeptical of much of the data our governments collected and distributed.
Not because of anything particularly nefarious, but because those who spent much time asking questions about the numbers knew both state and national public health information collection processes had some gaping blind spots.
At that time, we already knew the first year of the pandemic had exacted a brutal toll on medically vulnerable Michiganders who live in long-term care facilities.
Throughout the first nine months of the pandemic, between 30 and 50 percent of weekly reported deaths occurred at nursing facilities.
But they weren’t just uncounted, they were largely ignored.
It seemed like common sense – to us at least – that state numbers should include all nursing homes, not just the big ones. That excluding homes licensed for fewer than 13 beds would overlook thousands of potential illnesses and deaths from COVID-19, creating a substantial oversight gap that would disproportionately cast a data blind spot over rural areas.
Unfortunately, a preemptive letter sent from the director of MDHHS to the state auditor on the eve of the report’s release shows the agency’s attitude toward collecting accurate information on COVID in those small facilities hasn’t changed.
No, instead of collecting and disseminating its own data, MDHHS appears more interested proffering reasons it shouldn’t heed the auditor’s findings. They’re offerings that seem fixated on justifying an incomplete count, instead of seeking trustworthy numbers. Responses that lead us to wonder why MDHHS wouldn’t do the work of fixing its information deficiency itself after we pointed it out?
Such resistance seems both arbitrary and capricious at a moment when we face a fast-spreading new strain of the virus and even fully vaccinated nursing home residents once again face substantial risk if they’re exposed and infected.
Michiganders deserve trustworthy data that provides a complete picture of the pandemic’s impact on our most vulnerable.
Likewise, we simply shouldn’t accept life or death decisions informed by untrustworthy or incomplete numbers.
You would think getting trustworthy and complete numbers would be something the Whitmer administration would want. Unless they think those numbers wouldn't reflect well on their policies.
