COVID-19 two years later: What happened, what’s happening and what’s up next? 

Read more: COVID-19 kills high school sweethearts on family vacation

Two years ago, an invader so small that an army of 15,000 of them would fit on the head of a pin pushed the state into an emergency, shuttered our economy, locked us in homes, caused us to wear masks, restructured the way school and work got done and created a new, virtual world. 

Shortly after 10 p.m. March 10, just after then-Democratic candidate for President Joe Biden declared victory in the Michigan primary, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer held a press conference to announce that the first two confirmed cases of a novel coronavirus (that had already leveled populations in China) had been detected in Michigan. It had also already been spotted in other nearby states, and reviews of blood samples have since identified that the virus had already been circulating widely in major metropolitan areas of the U.S. as early as December 2019. 

As emergency orders started shuttering businesses and restricting travel to protect hospital systems from becoming overrun by people with the new virus, Michigan residents rushed out to hoard toilet paper and gun purchases shot through the roof. 

The advent of a once-in-a-century novel viral pandemic tossed pre-pandemic life up in the air like a deck of cards, and even now as the pandemic shifts the virus into what officials have called its endemic stage — meaning it will likely be here circulating for years. And Michiganders are still trying to find the rest of the cards lost in the now 2-year-old game of 52-card pickup. 

COVID comes knocking 

Kim Russom had already made plans for a lengthy leave from her work in her massage therapy business in East Lansing when COVID-19 appeared in Michigan. On March 6, she had major surgery on her shoulder that took her out of play at her therapy clinic and left the workload to five other massage therapists on staff. Russom expected the income from her successful small business to continue flowing in like normal until she could return five or six months later. 

But then, the stay-at-home orders started coming down from state and local authorities. 

“For the first time in my life, I was despondent. We didn’t know how long the shutdown would go,” Russom told City Pulse. “I had no income, my savings were depleting fast and I had no use at all of my right arm. I didn’t know if I would get it back. I just didn’t even know what to do.” 

Russom spent plenty of time crying — as well as taking webinars to prepare for a reopening, she said. Recovery from major shoulder surgery was complicated by the stay-at-home orders. 

Physical therapists attempted to counsel her through exercises on Zoom and other video platforms. But without the capacity for those experts to have their hands on her shoulder to determine what was and wasn’t working, her shoulder froze, leading to more surgeries and more frustrations — even as caseloads dipped and the world began to slowly reopen. 

Russom, like others, was shocked at the speed in which governments moved to shutter the economy and limit chances for the virus’ spread. The plan was to keep hospitals from being overrun by the sick, who often required intensive respiratory care and sometimes intubation. 

John Patterson, vice president of support services at McLaren Greater Lansing, said the hospital in Lansing began gearing up for the pandemic in late February and early March. 

“The first phase, in retrospect, wasn't as bad as it was with what we saw down the road, because initially everything was shut down. We weren't doing the elective surgeries. Our census had plummeted quite a bit,” Patterson said. “What we did notice is that the people that we were seeing were quite a bit sicker and people were delaying care.” 

While the first viral wave in 2020 was manageable, the second wave really taxed the system — mostly because hospital staff were being worn out by the workloads. He said staffing was the limiting factor in the hospital hitting maximum capacities in the second, third and fourth waves. 

While McLaren and Sparrow are considered competitors in the same market, the two hospitals were often coordinating — whether in connection with the county’s emergency operation center or through coordinated communications between the two entities. Patients were transferred between the two systems in order to keep staff from burning out or being too overwhelmed. 

On that Tuesday when the first cases were confirmed in Michigan, Ingham County Health Officer Linda Vail was in Washington preparing to speak at a conference. Instead of rubbing elbows with other health officers and public health practitioners, she found herself scrambling to book a flight back to the state before the coronavirus arrived in Greater Lansing. 

Initial stay-at-home orders were for two weeks. Cordelia Black, executive director of the Office of School Culture in the Lansing School District, said the district still had to jump into action to ensure kids receiving free or discounted meals received food — and that education continued. 

“We needed to get ourselves together around what that looked like for students right out of the gate,” she said. “Initially, when we closed down for two weeks, we knew that we just could not let kids sit out for two weeks. So, behind the scenes, your central level administrators had begun putting together supplemental educational resources for students. And so, as days and weeks continued to grow, we then started thinking about how we were going to get online.” 

School officials set up distribution sites for food. Others hand-delivered meals to families. The district scrambled to find and distribute enough technology for students to continue their schooling online. They hit a wall at purchasing new technology because every business and school system was doing the same thing. Within weeks, they were able to scrape together enough new and used tablets for students and teachers. 

Ingham County Prosecutor Carol Siemon recalled watering her office plants and packing what she thought she might need for two weeks at home when the stay-at-home order first arrived. 

Neither she, nor Black, imagined the original two-week pause would morph into months of virtual communication, limited real-life interactions without masks and 6 feet of social distance. 

“And, you know, some people literally didn't come back to the office for months,” Siemon said. 

While Siemon was figuring out how to pursue justice for victims with a shutdown court system and limited indoor gatherings, conservative lawyer David Kallman,  from the Great Lakes Justice Project, watched as the government used its powers to shutter most of the economy. 

“We didn’t come rushing out saying we deny there’s a virus,” he recalled. “We didn’t deny there’s an emergency. We didn’t do that.” 

But Kallman was wary of the government actions, and his phone was ringing with people wanting to do something about the state shutdown on all but a limited few types of businesses. 

“Clearly it’s been a pretty bad virus. But that doesn’t mean our Constitution is suspended and all rights are out the door and the government can do whatever it wants to do. That’s the balance,” Kallman explained. 

The first lawsuit his organization filed had challenged Whitmer’s orders because they didn't have a carveout to allow religious groups to meet in person. Whitmer ended up changing those orders to allow those gatherings before the case could proceed too far into the federal judiciary. 

Peter Jacobson, codirector of the Mid-States Region of the Network for Public Health Law and professor emeritus in public health and law at the University of Michigan, said that the pushback on masking and other mitigation efforts was similar to the 1918 flu pandemic. But he rejected the allegations from some that public health officials overstepped their authority or were deliberately being “tyrannical” and ignoring the economic and social impacts of shut downs. 

“It was a balancing act,” he said. “Those issues were taken to heart, but we had a novel, deadly virus and we didn’t know what was going to happen with it.” 

Ellery Sosebee, then a captain at the Lansing Police Department and now the chief of police, said law enforcement moved quickly to shift around work schedules to prevent the department from being overwhelmed with the virus. The new shift schedule allowed no more than half of the department to be exposed or infected at any given time. LPD also instituted new procedures for the jail to prevent infection from spreading and to keep the small lockup as empty as possible. 

Farhan Bhatti, a Lansing District Board of Education member and CEO of the nonprofit Care Free Medical, said early in the pandemic that his team shuttered for medical visits but later found the at-risk and under-insured patients they served didn’t have the technology to access telemedicine. While they shut down their optical and dental programs, they continued in-person medical visits for the most at risk. They also instituted tight prevention protocols, including screening procedures, masking and sanitizers. 

Michigan’s chief medical executive, Natasha Bagdasarian, was working in Singapore when COVID-19 appeared in Michigan. She told City Pulse that “decades” of underfunding of public health made responding to the pandemic more difficult.  

“There were signals that we were seeing elsewhere that could have been taken a little more seriously and people could have reacted a little bit sooner on the national level,” she said. 

Catching those signals, Bagdasarian explained, could have helped to create a much more robust testing program and prepare health systems for the size and scale yet to come.  

She remembers talking to friends stateside and asking: “Are you guys ready for this?”  

Law and order in a pandemic 

Two years ago, with much of the country having come to a screeching halt, Cherry Hamrick and her friend Mark Buzzitta decided to make use of their newfound freedom. Hamrick, 73, and Buzzitta, 48, have walked every day since the first stay-at-home orders.The two agreed to walk no less than a mile every day. If one or the other was out of the area, then the two would Facetime during their walks to encourage each other and socialize. 

To date, the two have walked 2,724 miles together. They’ve walked trails in Meridian Township, parks in DeWitt and more. They’ve also stuck to the streets in the Groesbeck Neighborhood where there is better street lighting and an earlier sunset.  

At the end of the day, there is one big reason they keep on walking, she said: “We like exploring!” 

But not everyone took the lemons of the stay-at-home orders and made pandemic lemonade. 

As COVID-19 pushed through the first of what would eventually become three waves of infection, and residents grew frustrated by what they saw as confusing and contradictory messaging about health risks, conservatives organized protests at the Capitol. 

On April 15, thousands of cars and trucks filled Lansing streets. Despite promises by organizers that everyone would remain in vehicles, hundreds gathered on the Capitol lawn to protest the stay-home orders from Whitmer. In the process, they caused some interference with Sparrow Hospital’s operations, said Sosebee said, who was then captain of the patrol division. 

Some ambulances were delayed getting to the emergency room. Chemotherapy patients also had trouble navigating the blockade. Remote Sparrow labs found their samples delayed. 

No arrests were made and law enforcement generally allowed the protests to continue without confrontation or citation. Nobody was cited for any violation of local or state health orders. 

Two weeks later, protesters descended on the Capitol again, this time rallying in the rain outside the building. Some were armed. They entered the building and attempted to enter the visitors’ gallery as well as the House floor in an attempt to end the orders that Whitmer had extended until May 15. Men armed with semi-automatic rifles and affiliated with different militias in the state stood in the Senate visitors’ gallery. The protests put Michigan on the national news with images of protesters screaming at law enforcement. 

That protest would later be called a dress rehearsal for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in DC. 

Siemon said there are broad strokes unpinning the rise in violent crime in Lansing, as well as a simultaneous decrease in property related crimes during the pandemic. She tied in the impacts of civil unrest — from those protesting the governor’s health orders to racial equity protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Siemon said the “constant stress for all” played into politics, drug overdose and suicide rates, social isolation, hate crimes and inequities. 

COVID-19 in Ingham County hit Black and brown communities harder than white communities. And transmission rates are still nearly double for Black communities over white communities. 

With the original two weeks of stay at home over, Siemon and her team had to figure out how to continue pursuing justice. Courts were still holding arraignments, often putting people back out on the street with either personal or low-cost bonds. The goal was to keep jails from being filled with people and having an outbreak of COVID-19 behind bars. For the most part, it worked. 

But it also meant the courts had developed overwhelming backlogs of cases requiring jury trials. 

“The biggest issue during the pandemic came with facilitating jury trials, because they require a large pool of potential jurors to assemble in one place,” said Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, who is also clerk of the 30th Circuit Court in Ingham County.  

“That process has been updated to include overflow areas, additional rooms, and other health and safety precautions. Due to the close proximity that prospective and selected jurors have with others, masking has been required since the outset of the pandemic as well,” she said. 

Siemon has since ordered her team to review cases to determine which suspects can be offered plea deals, avoiding a need for a jury and more courtroom time. If that wasn’t happening, the backlog could take years to clear, she explained. 

Before the pandemic hit, Ingham County was already experiencing hefty declines in the number of people it was sentencing to prison, according to county data. That was the result of Siemon’s focus on addressing racial disparities and economic burdens on individuals and finding solutions outside of incarceration, she said. Still, prison commitments continued to decline into 2020. 

In 2019, Ingham County sent 189 people to prison. In 2020, the number dropped to 73 — a decline that would stay steady into the pandemic with another 74 prison commitments in 2021. 

While the lack of jury trials added to the decrease, Siemon said there was a bit more to it. 

“The MDOC was not even taking persons sentenced to prisons, so they mostly stayed in local jails. It also generally meant that if someone was picked up on a parole violation, they might remain in jail instead of being remanded to prison,” she said. “The Interstate Commission for Juveniles, prosecutors, and judges did a very good job of keeping new admissions down for offenses that might have previously resulted in a bond/jail … but they also couldn’t move people who might have been awaiting an extradition or prison commitment.” 

Taking the risk of arresting someone, thus potentially exposing an officer to COVID-19 only to see that offender out on the streets the next day was “frustrating” for some cops, Sosebee said. 

The other public safety issue that rose to the forefront during the pandemic and stay-at-home orders, Siemon said, was the increase in reckless driving — both a local and national trend. She used to sit on her East Lansing patio and hear the drag racers rushing down Saginaw Highway. City Pulse reported a 48% decline in traffic stops in 2020 compared to previous years. 

Data from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Medicine Global Health Now reported last December that traffic fatalities were up nationwide by 7.2% in 2020, along with an 18% jump in the first six months of 2021. That same report found the number of miles being driven by American drivers had dropped by 13% over the same time period. Mothers Against Drunk Driving also reported last week that alcohol-related fatalities jumped up 14% from 2019 to 2020, despite Americans driving 11% fewer miles in that same period. 

While the data shows an increase in reckless driving and fatalities from vehicle accidents, Ingham County saw a decrease in the number of criminal cases authorized for reckless driving. 

In 2018, the office had 55 such cases. In 2020, it was 48 cases and in 2021, it was 41 cases. 

County officials said that not all reckless driving incidents would necessarily end up in the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office. Those might be a single-vehicle accident and fatality, or they might be charged under local authorities like the city of Lansing and East Lansing. 

Although an increase in gun violence incidents in Lansing had already begun when the pandemic struck, they escalated further with the shutdowns. Siemon said most of the gun violence arose from verbal arguments and, increasingly, from things published on social media. 

Sosebee said that while there are groups of young people regularly tied to the gun violence in the area, he doesn’t consider them gangs — with a leadership structure and rituals as are usual markers for gangs — because they were only loosely and socially associated with each other. 

He also blamed the increase in gun violence on verbal statements and social media posts. 

And while many Americans were rushing stores early in the pandemic to stock up on toilet paper, Sosebee noticed another trend: They were also buying more guns. 

“More guns means more opportunity for gun violence,” he said. 

Siemon and Sosebee also said the pandemic resulted in more domestic violence incidents, and Siemon said those cases are involving much more violence than before the pandemic hit. 

The train at the end of the tunnel? 

Now, while we approach the two-year mark of COVID-19’s assault on the state, cases of the highly infectious Omicron variant are on the decline — as are hospitalizations and deaths. The virus is still here — still spreading, still killing — but it is quickly receding into the background.  

As it does, health officials from the federal and state governments are beginning to loosen pandemic restrictions such as mask requirements and social distancing. 

The pandemic and its associated constrictions on life before the virus has resulted in some innovations that were originally unexpected. Black pointed out that parental surveys at Lansing schools found a significant number of students who would enroll in cyber education. As a result, the District launched an online academy late last year. Enrollment there now tops 700 students. 

And the new construction of McLaren’s hospital on the edge of Michigan State University resulted in a $1.2 million change order to create a floor filled with negative pressure — specially designed areas to prevent infections from flowing out of a room when a door is opened. 

Even while a new normal settles in, battles over vaccination and masking have continued. More than 1,000 cars and trucks rallied in Maryland last weekend to protest vaccination mandates in a clone of similar protests to the one that brought the Ambassador Bridge to a standstill. That protest hit the state’s car manufacturing market hard — as much as $350 million in one week. 

Meanwhile, Kallman is still working on lawsuits about masks. His case against Ingham County and MDHHS on behalf of Resurrection Schools will have a rehearing before the entire 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Kallman hopes to get the mandates tossed out on religious grounds — arguing that the masks inhibit learning and shroud a child’s God-given facial expressions. 

On top of that ongoing mask fight in the federal courts, Kallman has also fought on behalf of Western Michigan University athletes for their right to refuse a COVID-19 vaccination based on strongly held religious beliefs — a move that would violate WMU rules. The athletes were offering to get regular testing and to wear masks, but the university wouldn’t budge.  

On top of the federal court fights, some small businesses hit with citations by local and state health officials for operating in violation of pandemic orders are still winding their fights through the administrative process. Most, like Charlie’s Bar and Grill in Potterville, have paid their fines and had the licenses reinstated. 

While Haslett Public Schools Board of Education voted to rescind its mask requirement last month, Lansing Public Schools Board of Education plans to keep its requirement in place for the foreseeable future, Bhatti said. 

Three vaccines have now been approved for use in the United States and have proven markedly effective in preventing people from getting sick enough to require hospitalization and intubation, and even more effective at preventing death. There are also now therapeutics that help to stop the virus’ assault on the body — limiting the severity and duration of the infection. 

For most, there is a sense of a light at the end of a very long tunnel. 

But medical officials caution against popping the champagne just yet. 

Vaccine uptake has not been nearly high enough in the U.S. to prevent future waves of infections, nor has there been enough people vaccinated across the globe. Experts said that leaves the door open for the wily virus to find new genetic sequences, creating new variants that may be more infectious and more deadly. The new variants could also arise with the capacity to evade antibodies that vaccinated bodies have created as a line of defense. 

It’s still unknown. And what that looks like has already been seen. The Omicron variant, which fueled the last wave of the virus, was capable of slipping past some immunities which allowed vaccinated people to not only get infected, but develop mild symptoms and transmit the virus. 

Those without vaccination were significantly more likely to end up in the hospital or dead. Jacobson said the “antipathy and opposition” to vaccines “remains startling” to him. 

White House Medical Advisor and Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci has said in testimony before Congress and in press appearances that if a new variant arises that is able escape the antibody and immune responses generated by vaccines, a new variant-specific vaccine could be scaled up and produced within 100 days.  

In Ingham County, 73.4% of eligible residents — meaning those ages 5 and older — have received at least one dose of the vaccine. But that is not the case across the state. 

Like Ingham, Bagdasarian said the state is also working on implementing programming to deliver vaccines directly to communities that need them. Ingham County ran early pop-up clinics in communities throughout the county, and partnered with the Lansing School District to run, so far, nine vaccination clinics for students and their families. 

Looming on the horizon, all interviewed agreed, is a tidal wave of mental health issues caused by the pandemic. Vail pointed out that the isolation, the constant stress from fear of disease to financial woes and the impact of losing loved ones without saying goodbye would feed an increased need for mental health services. 

Black, from the Lansing schools, agreed, noting the district is trying to scale up systems to deliver the mental health support that students and families will need. 

Even if another variant of concern doesn’t appear, the effects of the four waves may linger physically in residents for months of years to come. Estimates vary as to how many people who contracted coronavirus will develop what has been dubbed “Long COVID.” But most estimates assume 30 percent of those who had coronavirus will also develop the lingering malaise. 

“Anytime you see a virus that impacts how we taste and smell, you know that it is impacting the nerves and the brain,” said Vail.  

Added Dr. Peter Guilick, an infectious disease doctor who teaches at MSU: “That is going to have an impact on the economy. Some, if not all, of those people are going to have issues getting back into the workforce.” 

He said many develop brain fog and post-exertional exhaustion. A walk from the front door to a mailbox can wipe out a person with the post-infection issues for hours or days. Brain fog results in people being unable to concentrate. Those with the syndrome can also develop hair loss, skin issues, lung issues and heart issues among other problems. Gulick said he has heard of patients who had lung tissue as dainty and fragile as tissue paper after their COVID-19 infections, creating significant issues for people who otherwise didn’t have health issues. 

Clinics to investigate Long COVID are being stood up at U-M and Beaumont Hospital systems, as well as the National Institutes of Health. Currently, the state of Michigan does not keep track of Long COVID cases in any public databases. 

“The fact is, we are still learning something new about this virus every day,” Gulick said. “While we think of it as a respiratory virus, it has the capacity to attack many different parts of the body, causing different issues of concern. Unlike SARS, this virus uses a very common protein system to enter a human cell, the ACE 2. It’s everywhere in the body.”