A Governor on Her Own, With Everything at Stake

Over the next week, Michigan’s Covid-19 numbers exploded. By the end of March, the state was reporting 7,615 confirmed cases and 259 deaths. Both totals were far higher than those in any of its neighboring states. Michigan is the nation’s 10th-most-populous state, but it had the fourth-highest Covid-19 case and fatality counts in the country.

Whitmer may have had more power than any of her predecessors, but even that wasn’t enough. On the most basic level, she was struggling to get the supplies she needed. The president had pitted states against one another in a global scramble for personal protective equipment that Whitmer and her staff referred to as “The Hunger Games.” Worse yet, he seemed to be building up his own federal stockpile of medical supplies at their expense. Whitmer texted the group: “We’ve been informed by a couple of vendors that the feds have commandeered what was supposed to be heading my way. Are you having the same issue? Detroit is getting hot.” One governor responded that he’d run into the same problem with an expected shipment of ventilators.

Michigan needed supplies, but no one on Whitmer’s staff had any experience buying specialized medical products on the international market, let alone ones that were in extraordinarily high demand all over the world at a time when commercial planes were barely flying. Whitmer and her team brainstormed. Michigan was the home of General Motors, which employed experts in global procurement and was also largely idle now that the state had been shut down. Maybe they could help. Someone on Whitmer’s staff found an executive who offered to work pro bono for the state, locating P.P.E. and building makeshift supply chains to move orders from China to Michigan.

Whitmer was also struggling to slow the virus’s spread. For all of the unknowns about Covid-19, one scientific certainty at the time was that diligent hand washing was critical to containing the outbreak. This guidance, seemingly simple, would be next to impossible for the thousands of Detroit residents who were without running water, in part because of a recent crackdown on late payments. Whitmer had actually anticipated this problem. On the eve of the state’s first reported cases, she and the mayor of Detroit introduced a joint program to restore water service immediately to homes where it had been shut off; customers would be billed later, at a rate of $25 a month for the duration of the outbreak. It soon became clear, however, that because of the city’s antiquated water system, many homes required extensive plumbing repairs before service could be restored. Whitmer issued an executive order requiring water suppliers to immediately send out crews to do whatever was necessary to restore service in every home.

The state’s unemployment system, meanwhile, was deluged. In an ordinary week, about 5,000 residents apply for unemployment benefits in Michigan; during the first week in April, there were 388,000 applicants. The state’s 350 claims processors couldn’t begin to keep up with the flood of callers. Tens of thousands of people who lost their jobs when the state shut down were unable to get unemployment checks. And the problem was not simply one of demand. Whitmer’s predecessor, Rick Snyder, had overhauled the system, arguing that it was a victim of widespread fraud. The effort ended in its own scandal — tens of thousands of residents falsely accused of fraud sued the state — but many of the changes that Snyder made remained in place, creating an obstacle course of highly specific requirements and red tape that only a very few could pass through. Before Covid-19 hit, just one in every four out-of-work Michigan residents was receiving unemployment benefits.

Even getting reliable data on Covid-19 cases seemed an insurmountable obstacle. The computer system that the state used to gather lab results from across Michigan was outdated and prone to mysterious crashes. In spite of these challenges, Michigan, because of its particular racial geography, was quickly able to see what would dawn more gradually on other states: A disproportionate number of those getting sick and dying were black. Forty percent of Michigan’s reported fatalities were in Detroit, a city that is nearly 80 percent black in a state that is nearly 80 percent white. There were a lot of explanations for this disparity. One was that Michigan’s investment in its public-health system had been declining for many years to the point where it was now spending less per capita than all but a handful of states. Detroit’s hospitals didn’t have the technology they needed to efficiently move patients among them; the city’s health department didn’t have the contact tracers they needed to follow up with those testing positive; nursing homes didn’t have adequate P.P.E. Another likely explanation was medical bias: Khaldun worried that black residents were being turned away at testing facilities by medical workers who downplayed the severity of their symptoms. It was a well-known phenomenon that was suddenly too pressing to address with a long-term plan alone. She sent a letter to all of the state’s medical professionals: “Complaints of symptoms should be taken seriously in any patient and particularly those from racial and ethnic minority groups.”