There are 14 Michigan counties, down from 22 last week, at a high COVID-19 level, meaning people in those areas should wear masks while indoors and in public, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The counties, based on new case and hospitalization data, are: Marquette, Alger, Mackinac and Schoolcraft counties in the Upper Peninsula; Cheboygan, Kalkaska and Manistee counties in northern Michigan; Macomb, Oakland, Livingston, Washtenaw, Wayne and Monroe counties in southeast Michigan; and Calhoun County, home to Battle Creek.
Delta, Luce and Chippewa counties in the U.P. and Presque Isle, Emmet, Charlevoix, Antrim, Benzie and Grand Traverse counties in northern Michigan were downgraded this week from high level orange to medium level yellow. Crawford County, also in northern Michigan, and St. Clair County, north of Detroit, went from orange to low level green.
Marquette, Kalkaska, Cheboygan and the southeastern counties, excluding St. Clair, were also orange last week.
Macomb, Oakland, Livingston, Washtenaw and Wayne counties have been orange for three straight weeks. Grand Traverse County fell off the list of high level counties this week for the first time in four weeks.
Newly orange as of Thursday are Alger, Manistee and Calhoun counties.
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Thirty counties are yellow and the remaining 39 counties are green. The west side of the state and the westernmost U.P. are green. The high levels seem to travel from the southeast to the northern part of the state and the U.P.
It is only at the high level orange that the CDC recommends universal masking while indoors and in public.
However, people with symptoms, a positive test or exposure to someone with COVID-19 should wear a mask regardless of where they live, the CDC says, and people at high risk of severe illness might need to take additional precautions when in high COVID-19 communities.
To see how the CDC assessed your county, check out the interactive map below. Tap on or hover over a county to see the underlying data.
Can’t see the map above? Click here.
After record cases in January and a steep decline, the CDC relaxed its mask guidance in February, shifting from only looking at cases and positive tests to looking at cases and hospitalizations. The idea is to prevent severe disease and limit strain on hospitals.
A county is at a high level when there are more than 200 new cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days and 10 or more new COVID-19 admissions per 100,000 people in the last week. (Not every county has a hospital, so each one is assigned a health services area, a geographic region that contains at least one hospital. Counties are attributed the metrics calculated for the entire area, weighted based on each county’s population.)
Michigan’s seven-day average of new, confirmed cases dropped this week. It had been increasing since the start of April.
Hospitalizations also were down.
The state reported Wednesday 1,037 adult and 35 pediatric patients in hospitals statewide with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19. A week earlier, there were 1,100 adult and 46 pediatric patients.
At the worst of omicron, there were about 5,000 COVID patients in hospitals.
Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, the state’s chief medical executive, said this week hospitals in Michigan are not universally overwhelmed, as they were in prior surges and Michigan remains in a recovery phase.
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The situation remains worst in the northeast region of the continental United States. Behind Hawaii, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Delaware have the highest per-capita new cases in the last seven days, according to New York Times data. Michigan is is down to No. 19. It was No. 12 a week ago.
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