The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported Aug. 17 that 95% of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 and 95% of those who died from it were not fully vaccinated.

But a reader would have to spend some time with the state report carrying that widely reported finding to discover it does not apply to this month or this summer. The mortality and hospitalization rates it cites are from Jan. 15 to July 28. That time period includes many months when comparatively few residents had been vaccinated.

For the more relevant recent period of June 3 through Aug.10, only 15% of the comparatively small number of deaths tied to COVID-19 were among fully vaccinated individuals. For hospitalizations, the number was 23%.

Nevertheless, the statistic that “95% of deaths were unvaccinated” has been widely cited by numerous media outlets.

The death and hospitalization rates from June 3 to Aug. 10 were the product of a Mackinac Center for Public Policy analysis of data provided online by the state of Michigan.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services confirmed in an Aug. 23 email that in the past 30 days, 23% of the people in Michigan whose test for the coronavirus returned a positive result had been vaccinated. During the same time, 28% of those hospitalized with the virus and 15% of the those who have died from it had been vaccinated.

As Michigan public schools wrestle with classroom face mask policies for this fall, a complication in the Midland area illustrates one of the challenges. Some students spend time in a building where two separate entities hold classes: the regular public school district and the educational service agency that handles many of the area’s special education services. Each has adopted a different mask policy.

Parents of several students attending Midland County Educational Service Agency classes have been informed by letter their children will be required to wear masks. But some of the agency’s classes are held in a regular Midland school district high school building, and it does not impose a student mask mandate.

Caught in the middle are parents who may have to deal with two public education operations serving the same community and two very different masking regimes.

At an Aug. 17 board meeting of the Midland County ESA, some parents of special needs students expressed their frustration that the dueling requirements treat their children differently when mingling with general education students. They questioned whether the conflicting requirements violate the American With Disabilities Act.

Jeffrey Pitt, a toxicologist whose child attends agency classes, said, “It is surprising to me that ESA is singling out special needs students, identifying them as different from regular education students in the school setting, for a minimal improvement of health and safety when compared to other real daily risks, e.g., riding in a car. For most of us, our special needs children are not more sensitive to Covid than regular education students, and believing they are, and treating them differently, is discriminatory, wrong and should never occur.”

A subcommittee of the Midland ESA said it would consider the concerns, which members took up at an Aug. 18 meeting. Superintendent John M. Searles explained the final decision in an email:

“All ESA employees and students will be required to wear masks when around other people while in buildings owned by Midland County ESA. Students and staff members in general education classrooms or programs located in buildings not owned by MCESA will follow the masking protocols of the host building or district.”