Commentary: As COVID-19 cases surge, Michigan shifts from the Whitmer Doctrine to the Shirkey Doctrine – Crain’s Detroit Business

Throughout Michigan's worst public health crisis in a century, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey has decried Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's management of the coronavirus pandemic as heavy-handed.

The Republican from Jackson County has even gone as far as saying the Democratic governor is "very comfortable being a dictator."

Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield sued Whitmer over her emergency powers and encouraged a petition drive to strip the governor of these extraordinary powers just in case they lost in the courts.

The Michigan Supreme Court ultimately sided with the GOP-run Legislature in a different lawsuit over the 1945 emergency powers law the governor used to keep certain businesses closed for months and limit social gatherings to contain the virus was unconstitutional.

Shirkey, who has long argued government cannot eliminate all risk, says people should have the freedom to choose their own level of risk in contracting or spreading this deadly virus.

Call this the Shirkey Doctrine.

It's a let-it-burn-through strategy with the virus that, in his words, includes "an element of herd immunity."

Except there's no safe, effective and readily available vaccine yet to inoculate the herd.

And just as new cases of coronavirus, hospitalizations and deaths are starting to rise again in Michigan in what might be a second wave of the pandemic, we're now sort of trying out the Shirkey Doctrine.

In the absence of Whitmer's executive orders, there's now a patchwork of regulations for businesses and individuals to follow from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration and county health departments.

In Detroit, there's another set of rules for businesses to adhere to with some slight differences. Other cities hard-hit by the virus are considering ordinances that are more restrictive than state-level orders under the public health and workplace statutes.

But none of these government bodies has the full weight and force of Michigan's chief executive.

Few people know who Robert Gordon or Sean Egan are (they're the director of MDHHS and MIOSHA's COVID workplace safety director, respectively).

Their orders don't carry nearly the same kind political and legal weight as the governor.

The MDHHS public health orders and MIOSHA's temporary rules are left open to potential legal challenges, adding more confusion among the masses about what's the law and what's not.

Confusion and sowing doubt in the science also is part of the Shirkey Doctrine moving forward.

For months, he has publicly encouraged mask-wearing and social distancing. He's even in the mask-sanitizing business.

But Shirkey has resisted any kind of public mandate and has been casting doubt on the effectiveness of two layers of cloth stopping droplets from the nose and mouth from escaping into the air other people breathe in confined indoor places.

He's resisting the precautions that the public had grown accustomed to in the interest of protecting their own health and the health of others.

Shirkey has, so far, resisted having the Legislature temporarily write a universal mask mandate into law, leaving the door open for more court battles for the Whitmer administration and counties to defend the various orders.

The Whitmer Doctrine has centered on the governor using the centralized powers of her office to try to limit the ways people can come in contact with COVID-19.

Whitmer's approach has, at times, been frustrating to many and financially devastating to some of the businesses that were left hanging in the wind for months on end.

The governor's communication of the reasoning and science behind keeping certain businesses closed and letting others reopen has been downright maddening at times.

But there's almost no debating that the spring lockdown produced the curve-flattening results that Whitmer promised.

By mid-June, as the economy was reopening, the daily case count was down to an average of about 150 new COVID-19 infections each day.

The 4,045 new cases reported Thursday and Friday pushed the new seven-day average to 1,425 nearly 10 times more COVID cases each day than four months ago when the Whitmer Doctrine was Michigan's strategy for navigating a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

As Whitmer gradually reopened sectors of the economy and people let their guard down, the virus started spreading again.

It was an inevitable outcome, especially when schools and college campuses reopened.

And, yes, the death rate from this virus for young people is very, very low.

But the death rate for their parents and grandparents is alarmingly high not to mention the long-term health scars COVID is leaving in people in already poor health.

A group of nationally recognized infectious disease experts wrote Shirkey a letter last week saying that in order to achieve herd immunity, 6.5 million people in Michigan alone would have to get infected.

"At the current mortality rate, this would mean more than 30,000 additional deaths more than four times the number of deaths to date," wrote the group of public health experts that included former Centers for Disease Control Director Tom Frieden.

There are 2.4 million residents in Michigan over the age of 60 (Shirkey being one of them).

The death rate for people in their 60s who have contracted COVID-19 in the past three months is about 3 percent, according to state data.

For people in their 70s, that death rate jumps to between 8 percent and 10 percent. For those older than 80, the death rate approaches 20 percent, according to state data.

One-in-five people over age 80 who contract COVID-19 are succumbing to this virus.

But what will happen if the societal expectation to wear masks, wash your hands and not go to a rock concert dissipates without a clear legal mandate from the people who write this state's laws?

That's something to bear in mind as we enter this period of trying it Shirkey's way.

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Commentary: As COVID-19 cases surge, Michigan shifts from the Whitmer Doctrine to the Shirkey Doctrine - Crain's Detroit Business