Gretchen Whitmer is the Andrew Cuomo of the Midwest

The state did conduct a study last summer with a limited sample to determine whether its vital records, meaning, records of life events kept under governmental authority, such as birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death certificates, included nursing home residents. Of the 1,468 vital records sampled from March 2020 through June 2020, 648 of those deaths were traced back to long-term care facilities, LeDuff reported. This means that during that time period, nearly half of all deaths in the state occurred in the state’s nursing homes. Whitmer’s decision to send coronavirus patients into those facilities almost certainly contributed to that death toll. The problem is we might never know for sure just how many Michigan nursing home residents died during the pandemic because state health officials stopped reviewing vital records “due to how time-consuming it is and the amount of resources we need to devote to doing this,” according to Bob Wheaton, a spokesman for Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services.