A healthy Michigan resident over 50 can receive the COVID-19 vaccine as soon as March 22. | Adobe Stock
A healthy Michigan resident over 50 can receive the COVID-19 vaccine as soon as March 22. | Adobe Stock
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced that Michigan residents over 50 who have a disability or preexisting condition will become eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine starting Monday, March 8, according to reporting by Bridge Michigan.
Eligibility expands to all citizens over 50, regardless of health, starting Monday, March 22. It is anticipated that 500,000 doses of the vaccine will arrive in Michigan this week, which is double the average number each week of the past month.
Over the next three weeks, more than 2 million additional Michigan residents will be eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. This greater than doubles the amount of Michigan residents currently eligible for the vaccine. The newly eligible citizens are part of the age brackets from which 97% of coronavirus deaths in Michigan have occurred.
“Making the vaccine available (to people over 50) will have an outsized impact on hospitalizations and deaths” Derel Glashower, Ottawa County senior epidemiologist, told Bridge Michigan.
These changes cause Michigan to be setting the national pace for lowering the eligibility age for the vaccine. Indiana and Connecticut are the only other states with the age limit set at 55 years old; most states are still vaccinating only those 65 and older. Previously, it was not anticipated that people under 65 without preexisting conditions would be eligible to receive the vaccine until July.
Michigan health officials have implied that they would not screen for health conditions, but rather accept the word of people attempting to schedule vaccinations. Some of the health conditions that make a person over 50 eligible for the vaccine are: chronic kidney disease, COPD, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and obesity.
The state government expects to vaccinate 80,000 people daily and might expand that to over 100,000 with the new doses arriving from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. Part of the reason for this aggressive expansion is that 47% of Michigan seniors have already received at least the first dose of the vaccine, according to Bridge Michigan.
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