Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day three hundred and fifty four since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's main story. Some Democratic governors have been under fire for mishandling nursing home outbreaks as the pandemic surged last spring. There are Republican critics see that as an opportunity. But first, here's what happened in virus news today. Federal health officials called on Texas and Mississippi residence to keep wearing masks,
even as governors there lift COVID nineteen restrictions. Rochelle Wilenski, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says it's premature to abandon mitigation efforts and that the virus can still erupt again. Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Tuesday that the state would lift its mask mandate and reopened businesses next week. He has also banning counties from finding or jailing people who disregard local measures defining previous warnings
from Woolenski and others. South African authorities said they ceased about two thousand, four hundred doses of fake coronavirus vaccines. After following up on a global alert issued by Interpol. The bogus shots were found at a warehouse in Germiston's near Johannesburg, and three Chinese nationals and a Zambian national were arrested, according to the police in a statement. Finally, at another vaccine in development is showing promising results. Bahara's
covaccent demonstrated interim efficacy after two doses. Those early results come from phase three clinical trials involving thousand, eight hundred patients. The study is still ongoing and the company will release a final analysis after there are a hundred and thirty confirmed coronavirus cases. And now for today's main story. In recent months, GOP lawmakers have keeped criticism on Democratic governors for how they handled outbreaks at nursing homes early in
the pandemic. Michigan Republicans, who have been hostile to Governor Gretchen Whitmer throughout the crisis, are now asking the state's attorney general to investigate how she coped with that challenge. Republicans say that people died unnecessarily thanks to Whitmer's order that nursing homes readmit residents with COVID nineteen if they
had capacity and quarantine capabilities. I spoke to Detroit Bureau Chief David Welch, who says Michigan's fatality rate was lower than the national average and that many of those on the pandemics front lines dispute the assertions. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has recently faced several critiques regarding how she handled Michigan's nursing homes during the COVID crisis. I was just wondering if you could maybe outline some of those criticisms she's faced.
The primary one is affected during the summer when COVID was really spreading heavily in Michigan, actually spring um, she issued an order saying that nursing homes could and in fact should, take COVID positive residents back into the homes or accept them in u Now, her order did say as long as the nursing homes had a place where they could quarantine them and and proper equipment in place so that everybody could take care of these patients without
the virus spreading all of the place, then fine. However, the Republicans jumped on that immediately, and they pushed her to open nursing open up field hospitals and convention centers and places like that. And despite lasted all throughout where the Republicans wanted her to put them someplace else, and as nursing home deaths from COVID kept rising, the criticism
got hotter and hotter. In reality, Luchi and actually did better in terms of percentage of deaths and nursing homes than the average state, and actually did quite a bit better than neighboring Ohio, which as a Republican governor and did kind of the same thing that Whitman did, which was allowing people back into nursing homes with COVID as long as they could be quarantined somehow. So you can
see how political this got. The Republican is jumping all over her for it, and uh and Witmer standing her ground and saying this is this is the best way to handle them. It came back up again in the wake of Governor Cuoma in New York, Governor Newsman California, Governor Wolf in Pennsylvania getting a lot of criticism from Republicans and their states over this. Quoma situation is obviously different because there are allegations that he actually tried to
hide numbers. No one has suggested that Whitman did that, but once that came up, the Republicans asked the Democratic attorney general in Michigan to investigate her over this. So what started to the last April May as a big controversy and heated up later in the summer has come back up again, you know, almost a copyhead calls for investigation that we've seen in a handful of other democratic states around the US. And as you've already pointed out,
there is a very significant political angle here. What do you see as the perhaps broader national political agenda to these critiques. This is very similar to how the Democrats got Donald Trump out of the White House. There were a lot of things that the Democrats used against Donald Trump, issues of race and gender and so forth, But really his his response to COVID, and they're alleged in the alleged inadequacy of it, really kind of did Trump in
with a lot of swim voters. So Republicans are trying to tear a page out of that same book. They see an opening with these nursing home deaths in Michigan, and they're going after wit before in the same way they have in other states. The reason I brought up Ohio earlier is you have in Michigan about thirty three percent of COVID death from nursing homes. Patients were allowed and if if the nursing home had the space, had the equipment to quarantine those people. I had a pretty
similar set of rules for its nursing homes. Of the state's death from COVID. We're in nursing homes, and they had a couple of thousand more of them in the nursing homes as well. And none of the Republicans have gone after Mike Dwine, a Republican for the same thing. So there are some obvious political things. There are also some legitimate questions about this is how nursing homes were handled, and this is the best way to do it, uh and we're there potentially better choices, But it doesn't look
like that's what's going on here. Because this this whole thing came up, it had kind of gone quiet for a while and then came up again once it became controversial in New York and in California, and exactly right, I mean, with the recent accusations against Governor Cuomo. As you outline that there has been some um suggestion that there has been let's say, mishandling of the data or
even hiding of numbers. I mean, when we look at Michigan's numbers, um, I mean, is there any reason not to trust the data that Michigan is reporting potentially and look at you know, I want to give some of the Republicans at least who are questioning this their due. Data from nursing homes is not great, and there wasn't a great system for gathering that data because we didn't
have a pandemic like this before. And what's what's what was supposed to happen If a nursing home had a resident who caught COVID and they got sick enough that they had to go to a hospital. If that resident had a room still reserved for them in the nursing home, but they passed away in the hospital, the nursing home was supposed to count that death in their facility. If they weren't holding the room, then the hospital would count it.
Arguably was still a nursing home death. What we also don't know is how consistently nursing homes were actually doing this. Some of the employees I talked to said that nursing homes were actually trying to kind of key the case and death count low because they didn't want to be
seen as a COVID institution. One of the things that happened during the pandemic was nursing home capacity rates are say, occupancy rates fell from about you know, typically eighty four percent to as low as seventies and nursing rooms needed patients are needed residents. Is not a great way to make a lot of money in that business, so they, you know, there was an incentive to try to keep
the numbers low. Is this something Whitman did? Is something that state did know that the residencies were supposed to report this stuff and reported accurately. It hasn't been audited. No one knows how accurately they were reporting it. Now. Robert Gordon, who's the let's say passed head of the Michigan Department of Health and Safety, he said he couldn't stand by the data for those reasons because they just
don't know. Now, if you want to say that Michigan State is no good and therefore the comparison that a third of its death with for from COVID is not really valid. That presupposed other states had a great system for collecting this data as well, and it's not really clear that they did. In fact, we talked to the Kaiser Institute well reporting this out and they said, look, it is really hard because not every state reports the same way and out every state has great data collection.
It's you know, it's it's not a terrible number to use, but it's never going to be perfect. So yeah, there are questions about this, and you would you would only know what if you audited it. You know, maybe that's one thing the Republicans would like to see. It's not a bad idea because then again, we're gonna assess the extent of the problem in nursing homes and try to have them prepared for the next time around. It's it's
not that's not an unreasonable request. And when we look at the situation that's happening in Michigan and kind of these accusations and finger pointing, I mean, is it something that you would see is is perhaps a more fundamental divide between say Republicans and Democrats about how to stem COVID spread, whether to focus on say hot spots like nursing homes, or for example, introducing stricter measures at the
community levels, such as shutting down restaurants or gym's. This is a big issue in Michigan and it's one of the reasons we really focused on the nursing home and COVID issue here because the politics have been so divisive. You had people armed, protesters marching on the capitol over Governor Woodman, shut down orders of gym's, restaurants, bars, and
so forth. There was a lot of accusation by Republicans over the past year that she was overreaching and what she was shutting down, and there were probably similar She had criticisms there that that businesses like construction contractors that that had to down their tools for a little bit, you know, they were by that by the spring would have been working outdoors. That didn't last long though She
kind of got things going back up pretty quickly. But a lot of these other issues, and including mask wearing in some cases where the subject of the protests from Republicans and from conservative groups. They didn't like the fact that the governor had executive orders to tell them what to do and what to wear and when to work
and what could be open. And the biggest indicator of whether a nursing home has a serious issue with COVID or not is what's going on in the outside community, because what the health care studies are saying is that the employees bring it in. People are out at restaurants, bars, or just from family members, they get COVID symptoms are mild in the early days. Testing was really bad in the first six months of the pandemic hit, and they go to work anyway, and then they spread it around
the nursing home. You know, the nursing homes are places where people are kind of close together, a lot of people in a small facility. You know, a lot of the people who work there couldn't afford to take paid time off. So even if they had mild symptoms, didn't know they had COVID. They certainly weren't being that cautious in all cases. And that's a big issue. So, you know, the Republicans saying, well, these you know, there are other ways to manage the nursing homes, and there may have been,
but none of the solutions were great. But really the best way to keep nursing hose from getting it was to protect at the outside community. And though and and and the measures to protect communities are the things that they fought the most. And speaking of nursing homes, let's let's look at it from the employee side. I mean, how were they supported in Michigan. The employees were not equipped and they know. I talked to a number of
people who work in the nursing homes. They were doing things like if they had a mask and the band broke, they were stapling it back on. Some of them told me that if they had the basic surgical mask, let alone in the nine had a basical surgical mask, they were doing pretty well. So they were not equipped at all. And the other problem is they make about thirteen hours an hour. Governor Whitmer eventually ordered a two doll an hour raise to give these people a little bit of
breathing room. But a lot of them didn't have paid
time off. The nursing home Reunion, the s c IU was negotiating a new contract during the pandemic to try to get paid time off, trying to get a raise, to get better healthcare because a lot of the workers, if they had some symptoms, they were only being tested every seven days and it took another week to get the test back, so they could have COVID symptoms or be symptom free, and the test would take six or seven days to come back, and they would be working
with and amongst intreating nursing home residents while they may have had the virus in the early and most contagious stages. So when you can't afford to take time off, you go into work, and these people had to be there. And people are also quitting nursing homes because they didn't want to catch COVID during the pandemic, so you had fewer and fewer people. They were working long hours, some of the moonlight in different nursing homes, so it really
was a bad situation. They didn't have the equipment, they didn't have the training, and there were too few of them working long hours um and they were either afraid or couldn't afford to take the time off if they had some symptoms. It was quite a bad situation. That was David Welch and that's it for our show to Day. For coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review
and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Top for foreheads Magnus Henrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by David Welch. Original music by Leo Cedrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.