Governors are preoccupied with 'resisting' Trump as senior citizens suffer and die in their long-term care homes

The young man who beat up his elderly roommate in a Detroit nursing home last week, filmed himself doing it, then posted the video to social media, was only a resident in that home because Governor Gretchen Whitmer forced nursing homes to become coronavirus wards.

The father of Jadon Hayden, the young man, said that his son should not have been in the nursing home at all, and has pre-existing mental issues, including hearing voices and autism. It was after the man was diagnosed with COVID-19 that he was moved out of his group home and taken to the nursing home to be quarantined.

Once he was quarantined in the nursing home, he brutalized his roommate, a veteran, who is expected to make a full recovery despite being beaten mercilessly about the head. The nursing home was not aware of the violence until the video went viral on social media, which came to the attention of police, who in turn informed the residence.

How did we get to a place where we allowed one problem to take such supremacy that we decided to ignore all the other problems? Such is the case in Governor Gretchen Whitmer's Michigan, where concerns over flattening the coronavirus curve turned to directives on staunching the spread, resulting in a total disregard for literally any other issue.

In large part, these Democratic governors are seeking to distance themselves from Trump and his broader directors to reopen the American economy. As Trump issues more and more directives encouraging states and localities to allow their citizens to go back to work, Democratic governors like New York's Andrew Cuomo continue to extend their states of emergency. This gains praise from other Democratic leaders, many of whom can also work from home.

Whitmer enacted an executive order in April that told nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients, putting other residents, who were not positive for the disease, at risk. The nursing home population, as we have seen, is particularly vulnerable to coronavirus fatality.

About a third of coronavirus deaths in the US have been in nursing homes. Yet Whitmer, along with New York, and Pennsylvania, instructed these long-term care facilities to accept those patients. Fear, it turns out, makes authorities do crazy things.

As they attempted to protect the public, they ignored this vulnerable population, and put them at greater risk than they would have been had the governors merely instructed them to limit visitors. The concern with putting potentially dangerous, mentally disturbed people into nursing homes never entered the governors' minds, because they were so preoccupied with coronavirus that they forgot about literally everything else.

While other states backed off this directive to house coronavirus positive patients in nursing home facilities, Whitmer re-upped Michigan's, saying that those long-term care facilities that have less than 80 percent of their beds filled must open up to accept coronavirus patients. When this order lapses on Wednesday, Whitmer should not seek to extend it.

Nursing homes are not hospitals, and while they care for the elderly and infirm, they are not set up to deal with concerns that differ from geriatric ones. A dedicated coronavirus ward requires specific measures to stop the spread of the contagion. Imposing those kinds of requirements on facilities that were designed and operate for completely different purposes is a recipe for disaster.

While Whitmer was instructing everyone to stay home, wear masks, and self-isolate, her orders had a direct and deleterious effect on those Michiganders who needed her protection most.

To date, Michigan has had 54,679 coronavirus cases, with 5,228 deaths and 33,168 recoveries so far. There were 5 deaths on Sunday, and Whitmer has extended the state of emergency through June 12.