Cuomo canceled his order forcing nursing homes to take COVID patients; Whitmer extends hers

Sometimes I wonder if Rob and I are being too parochial with all of our Michigan-related columns lately. Granted, Gretchen Whitmer’s illegal and unwise lockdown orders are of national interest – especially since she’s apparently on Joe Biden’s shortlist for his running mate.

And when one of your cities is nine feet under water, you can’t really ignore that.

Still, I’ve been wondering if some of you who live in other parts of the country (which, granted, is most of you) get tired of us writing about our state. Sure, we think there are all kinds of things wrong with Whitmer, but maybe you’re thinking, OK guys, we got it.

Then I see a story like this, and I realize you need to know about it. We told you a few days ago about the disaster that’s been unfolding in New York nursing homes, where Andrew Cuomo gave the astonishingly foolish order that nursing homes had to take COVID-19 patients. That has unleashed a stunning carnage of nursing home deaths, and once it became apparent what a terrible mistake this was, Cuomo – to his credit – rescinded the order.

What you may not have known was that Cuomo wasn’t the only governor who issued such an order. Guess who else did! Gretchen Whitmer. Now you might think, well, once the disaster that unfolded in New York became known, any governor would rescind a similar order. At the very least, they wouldn’t extend the order once it was expiring.

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You’d think that, but as the Detroit News reports, if you’re thinking about Gretchen Whitmer, you’d be wrong:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had put in place a similar policy, but recently backtracked when it became evident the harm that was being done to the population most vulnerable to the virus — the ill and elderly. 

Whitmer, by contrast, renewed her initial order when it expired last week, extending it with an identical mandate — disregarding the concerns and advice of nursing home advocates and legislators. The order requires long-term care facilities with less than 80% capacity to create COVID-19 units and to accept infected patients.

“These were areas that we immediately brought to the attention of the state and said you shouldn’t be implementing this in this manner,” Melissa Samuel, president of the Health Care Association of Michigan, has told us.

It’s beyond comprehension to me that a governor would issue an order like this in the first place. It’s been understood from the beginning that the elderly were more at risk than the rest of the population to life-threatening bouts of COVID. So why would you knowingly send infected patients into an environment where other elderly people would have no escape from it? It’s like handing them a death sentence.

So it’s impossible to excuse the decision in the first place. But I guess you could at least say the tragic outcome could only be expected. Once it had actually happened, then anyone with the slightest semblance of a brain would rescind such an order.

Except that’s not what Whitmer did. She extended her order last week, and it remains in effect right now.

WDIV-TV reported on Monday that nearly 2,000 nursing home residents have died from COVID in the Metro Detroit area alone. How many of those people would be just fine today if Gov. Whitmer hadn’t ordered those nursing homes to take in COVID patients?

And yet the order remains in effect.

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The national media are portraying Gretchen Whitmer as a rising national star, and Joe Biden is seriously considering offering her up for the vice presidency.

This is who Gretchen Whitmer really is.

(UPDATE: Late Wednesday, Whitmer did not rescind but “clarified” the order that COVID patients should only be released to nursing homes who could safely isolate them. And she extended it to June 17.)