Whitmer: ‘[COVID] has carried a long, hard price tag’

LANSING, Mich. (WLNS) — In a recent interview with The New York Times, titled “Gretchen Whitmer Wants a Gen X President–in 2028,” Whitmer said that knowing what she knows now about COVID-19–she would have handled some parts of the COVID response differently.

Michigan’s stay-at-home order in 2020 lasted longer than other states’, with schools not urged to reopen until a year later. “It was New York, Detroit, it was Chicago and it was New Orleans that were having a massive impact from COVID,” Whitmer said in the NYT interview.

And now, she said, students are performing below pre-pandemic levels in reading and math.

“I think we have to remember that we were looking at lessons from the Spanish flu, and that particular virus absolutely was devastating to young people,” Whitmer said in the New York Times article.

“And as a person taking in as much information as I could from our epidemiologists and our public-health experts, the thought was that we might have a lot of school-age kids that were going to die from this virus. That’s really what motivated our actions and the actions of lots of governors when we stopped kids going to school.”

Whitmer went on to say, “It has carried a long, hard price tag with it. We’ve made massive investments in early childhood and…we’re working to help get our kids back on track.”

You can view the full New York Times article here.

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