New stay at home order for Michigan - no visiting friends and neighbors

Poor judgment on Whitmer's team rolling out the merchandise restrictions.

Apparently, some items have more rights than others.

Once you start down this path, you are on shakey ground, especially if law enforcement is spending manpower on cart checks.

Eliminating home/yard care products during the boredom shutdown is counter productive to mental health.

How much blatant bad behavior is really going on at this point?

Meanwhile lottery and liquor State cash cows remain essential. Gonna be a whole big mountain of returnable come May.

Read an article today that about 1/2 of US total food production goes to sustain restaurant, resort, hotel, casinos, schools, universities, and cruiselines. They are plowing under produce back into the soil in California. Milk at commercial dairies poured down the drain. Excess cattle, pork, poultry is quickly reaching slaughter and dispose levels.

Lots of crazy spin-offs hitting the economy. Selective banning of consumer goods is absolutely bad policy. Every product elimination results in more layoffs. 

Outside of the metropolitan hot spots, many hospitals are laying off staff, as most elective procedures are not available. Temporary hospitals in civic centers etc, are being shut down, as they are not needed.

Don't try to put your fishing boat in at any launch, head up north, plant any tomatoes, paint the garage door. People can observe the distancing without having these extreme measures in place.

Would be nice to see the fed & state government step up with the incredible lack of sanitizer, and general public level masks for all. Everyone over 50 entering a grocery store given a free mask.

Michigan leadership is trending down a path which leads to a bad place. Self isolating is one thing, eliminating freedoms is another.

At least Gretchen gave the Easter Bunny a pass on filing a UIA claim this week.

The new exec order are a cluster frock. Landscaping, home improvement supplies, other gardening is overreach.

Civil discourse will increase in time, ie more violations and ticket writing from the police. (yet they are letting more criminals out jail for COVID concerns but they'll throw some us in jail for these such violations.)

Poor leadership from our Gov.

This type of directive from the Governor will have no real impact on Covid transmission and only serve to elevate the frustration of the people. 

As someone in California that has been doing this for almost a month already, it seems insane to me that this is just happening now in Michigan

Wayne county currently has half of the confirmed cases in the state, and Southeastern Michigan (Wayne plus adjacent counties) is 80% of the total cases. Most counties have less than 100 cases, and many less than 50.

I'm fine with the extension to April 30, it matches what my employer already did and also other states. But if the curve continues to drop throughout the month as the models suggest, by May we should be able to lighten up on restrictions in places outside SEMI. I think many (not all) non-essential businesses can re-open incrementally with safety measures. Slowly raise the number of people allowed to meet to 10, 20, 40, etc. If Detroit needs to stay shelter-in-place through May, fine, but the less populated parts of the state without significant spread now or then don't need to be held to the same restrictions. 

By then, many people are likely to start going out anyway, and local law enforcement is going to let them. And selective enforcement usually means bad law. 

Chicago has now imposed a 9 p.m. curfew on the sale of alcoholic beverages. I feel like Bluto in Animal House, “they took the bar! The whole effing BAR!!!” Where’s Otter to toss you a whisky at times like this?

We’re beginning to plan deliberate violations of the stay at home orders here. Vulnerable demographics can remain segregated, perhaps with government and neighborly assistance, but life must go on and we are going back to work soon regardless of “expert” edicts. If our mayor can get her hair cut and pose immediately next to her stylist without mask and gloves, then we can jog through the park and meet and confer in person with clients while exercising appropriate protocols for reducing exposure. This event has been badly miscalculated, both in terms of severity and economy, and the folks in charge know it.

Good luck to those of you back in my home state. As for my fellow Chicagoans:  see you outdoors and at work, soon.

I have supported the Governor until yesterday. Not allowing solo landscapers doesn't make any sense. Also, I'm cool with limiting the amount of people in stores, but to block off the gardening and paint areas? That's stupid. Some common sense goes a long way.

I can live without golfing. It's a luxury I know, but her answers yesterday showed how little she knew about the topic. Golf courses can easily have people book tee times and pay online without ever having to go inside. She also could have said no riding carts or flag sticks. She could have even said people have to play by themselves. There are many things she could have said that made it looked like she was actually critically thinking a little bit.

Since it's a holy weekend for Christians, I can't help but be curious what will happen to the incidence rates in those communities / states that still permit religious gatherings. I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems unsettling to me...

Edit:  looks like for March overall deaths are down 30% according to mi hhs as reported by detnews.  We recorded 6k deaths in march 2020 we usually see 8.5k.

So as of today we've had 1282 c19 deaths in Michigan.  We started tracking it in March and its data through April 10 so lets say it has been 40 days.

Now what nobody is asking is how far above the basline number of expected deaths are we for the same time period?  

MI HHS data i found on a quick search showed 262 deaths per day in Michigan in 2018. So the baseline number of deaths for the past 40 days is 10,480 deaths.

So c19 deaths are at worst a 12.2% increase above the baseline expected deaths for this period of time.  That is a large number but due to mitigation efforts certain types of deaths have to be down, i.e. traffic fatalities thus reducing the actual death count.  And due counting methodology certain types of death that would have occured anyways are classified as c19. So how many deaths over our expected baseline are we?  I think its safe to say around 10%.

There are 40,000 traffic fatalities each year in the US.  We could save all those lives immediately if we banned automobiles. And reduce global warming too.  Of course that would never happen due to the convienence that autos provide us.

During the great recession MI averaged 31,000 unemployment claims a week.  For the last two weeks we have been above 300,000.  

So we have plunged our economy into a recession 1000% deeper than the great recession to keep deaths at worse to a 10% increase over the baseline.  There doesn't seem to be a balance there.  You can't be 100% risk averse in public policy decision making.

As for the models, we learned they aren't reliable.  First we heard 2.2 million would die in the US.  Then april 1 the imhe model (assuming full social distancing through may) was 100 to 200 thousand deaths.  Then it was revised down to 80 thousand and then again revised down to 60 thousand in about 8 days.  If the model is changing so significantly in such short times all in the same direction it means the model is unreliable because fundamental assumptions in the model were flawed.  That or it was intentially biased.  What is even more concerning is that public policy decisions are being made based on such a flawed model.

The good news is that we appear to be peaking, UM announced it will close its field hospital because they dont expect to need it.  Henry Ford says its discharging more than its admitting.  HCQ plaquenol and Zpack appear to be effective treatments.  Rumor at my wife's hospital is that they might begin to convert ORs back for surgeries since they aren't needed for c19 anymore.  Deaths may still surge because it lags new cases.

I'm glad the GOP led legislature only extended Whitmer's emergency declaration 23 days instead of the 70 she asked for. I'm sure she would extend her stay at home order out the full 70 days if she could.  Hopefully she never gets the authority to do so.

Its insane that my wife, son, and I can't go visit my mother in law on Easter Sunday.  But on weekdays she can come over to watch my 9 month old son while my wife goes to work in the hospital and I work from my home office.  

Local organizers in Charlevoix just canceled the Venetian Festival at the end of July. Such a hopeful outlook on these folks' parts. 

In my humble opinion this is total over reaction and a lack of foresight. There are more people working on this by far than worked on the mission to the moon and this will get solved in a few weeks. In the meantime you just wrecked your economy through the end of the summer. Nice.