Michigan Coronavirus Deaths Top 500, Travel Screeched To A Halt After Stay Home Order

First, the good news. Michiganders have stopped traveling, following one of the key public health guidelines to halting the spread of COVID-19.

That’s according to the New York Times, which analyzed anonymous cell phone data from 15 million people for the week of March 23 to track how people were traveling amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Michigan’s stay at home order went into effect on March 24.

In Michigan, 80 of 83 counties show travel of less than one mile per day, per the Times. Alpena, Baraga and Dickinson are the exceptions, but they are still posting less than half as normal traffic.

The data show that many people in the West, Northeast and Midwest are complying with stay at home orders.

Aaron A. King, a University of Michigan professor who studies the ecology of infectious disease, told the Times, “That’s huge. By any measure this is a massive change in behavior, and if we can make a similar reduction in the number of contacts we make, every indication is that we can defeat this epidemic.”

And now the bad news. There are now 540 people who have died of COVID-19 in Michigan. That’s 61 new deaths, as there were 479 on Friday.

There are now 14,225 positive cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by a new coronavirus, as of 3 p.m. Saturday, although state officials believe the actual number of cases is much higher. There were 12,744 cases on Friday, so that’s an increase of 1,481 cases. Sixty-nine of Michigan’s 83 counties have cases and 33 have reported deaths.

Metro Detroit continues to be hardest hit by the virus. Detroit, the only city with its own health department, reported 3,958 cases and 131 deaths. The rest of Wayne County had 2,804 cases and 121 deaths.

Oakland County posted 2,785 cases and 142 deaths. Macomb County had 1,838 cases and 78 deaths.

The state recently started including racial data. Notably, African Americans are 34% of cases and 40% of deaths. Whites are 24% of cases and 29% of deaths. Asians compose 1% of both categories. The race was unknown for 36% of cases and 26% of deaths.

The new state-reported numbers only recently began incorporating data from other commercial and private labs and hospitals around Michigan, which caused an apparent spike in numbers that speaks more to the number of cases just now being publicly reported.

The first two cases of COVID-19 were reported in the state on March 10. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency that day.

Johns Hopkins University reports that there are 1.17 million confirmed cases worldwide and almost 64,000 deaths. In the United States, there are almost 300,000 confirmed cases and almost 8,100 deaths.

This story was originally published by the Michigan Advance. For more stories from the Michigan Advance, visit MichiganAdvance.com.