Northern Michigan vacation paradise tops state's COVID-19 vaccination rates

As Michigan backslides toward a possible fourth coronavirus surge — this time with the highly contagious delta strain — health experts hope to stem the viral tide by raising the state’s vaccination rate past its stuck threshold of around 65%.

That number means that the remaining 35% of eligible Michiganders, ages 12 or above, have yet to get even their first dose.

In trying to get more people vaccinated, health experts looked around to see which Michiganders were beating the average, and why. It might seem the top vaccination rate would land in some populous county loaded with hospitals, or an area where hip suburbs are dotted with vaccine sites. Instead, Michigan's top county for getting residents protected with a COVID-19 vaccine is a prime vacation and retirement spot way Up North: lake-studded Leelanau County.

This place west of Traverse City, known for its Sleeping Bear sand dunes, waterfront homes and orchards, has Michigan’s highest vaccination rate — 83.8%, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (All percentages cited are through Friday, and for Michiganders ages12 and up).

Pandemic experts have eyed Leelanau County from the earliest days of COVID-19 vaccinations, said Marisa Eisenberg, an associate professor of epidemiology and complex systems at the University of Michigan.

“Their vaccination rate spiked up very early, so they’ve led pretty much from the get-go. And now, they’ve reached that magic 80% rate” — magic because 80% is so rare anywhere in the country, Eisenberg said. Leelanau County’s public health staff hasn’t quit promoting the vaccine, she said, adding: “They’re still giving about 350 first doses a week."

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Eisenberg and her public health peers have sought to learn why so many Leelanau County residents rolled up their sleeves, to see if there's a formula for success that other areas could copy. What they found, while not replicable everywhere in the state, explains a lot about why the county that raises tart Empire apples; that’s coveted by upscale retirees who could live anywhere; that’s a boater’s paradise and sells wine made by Madonna’s father, is also one of Michigan’s healthiest places to live — and now, a place that approaches a dream come true for the pandemic's public health gurus. The secret in Leelanau is age, education and wealth.

It should be said, though, that by no means is every Leelanau County resident on the same page regarding vaccination, or for that matter, masking up. The county commission held a contentious two-hour meeting on Sept. 9, when dozens of residents vented their anger about the county health director’s order to require masks in schools. Commissioners then voted 4-3 on party lines, with four Republicans stating their wish to rescind the public health order. Their motion had no legal effect, according to county attorneys. By state law, county health departments are independent units of government over which county boards have no legal authority.

Vaccinations, however, have been less controversial, Leelanau County Commission Chairman William Bunek said.

 "The attitude of people up here is tremendous" in being generally receptive to vaccinations, although Bunek, whose day job is electrical contracting, declined to say whether he'd been vaccinated.

"People get sensitive about it if you ask them, you know?" he said.

Despite that sensitivity, and the snit over masks, the county's politics are not as red as its crimson neighbors. After supporting Donald Trump for president in 2016  Leelanau voters in 2020 swung to Joe Biden, who won with 52.0% of the vote, although they elected nearly all other Republicans on their ballots. Counties that are staunchly Republican are not as likely to be staunchly pro-vaccine. Of Americans who’ve received COVID shots, 86% were Democrats compared with 54% Republicans, according to a survey for the week ending July 27, conducted by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. (The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.)

Yet, a more important factor, outweighing politics, is sheer age. Older Americans are generally more receptive to COVID-19 vaccines and Leelanau County has a swarm of retirees. Nearly a third of its population, or 32%,  is 65 or older. Statewide, that age group comprises 17.7% of Michiganders, according to the U. S. Census Bureau.

Age more than any other factor has been linked to COVID-19 vaccination rates, according to data from across Michigan and the nation, said Mark Hornbeck, spokesman for AARP in Michigan. Hornbeck gave five reasons why the nation’s seniors sought vaccinations for COVID-19: 

• Seniors got top priority for shots from the beginning, along with health care staffs. 
• Senior death rates from COVID-19 were much higher than those of younger Americans. 
• Seniors tend to respect doctors and other health care professionals, so they accepted the advice to get shots.
• Many seniors live in retirement centers or nursing homes, where vaccines were readily available or even mandatory.
• And many elderly Americans lived through eras when vaccines wiped out other diseases like polio and smallpox.

Leelanau County Administrator Chet Janik, appointed by the county’s elected officials in 2012, was feeding his eight chickens when he pondered why so many county residents rolled up their sleeves to be vaccinated. For Janik, it began with his county having not just the most lake frontage of any county in Michigan, but the second most of any county in the nation — just behind a county in Washington State that has nothing like Lake Michigan sand dunes, he said, citing a ranking by the National League of Counties.

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“We have Sleeping Bear National Park,” Janik said. “So retirees really love coming here for all this natural beauty, and they tend to be people with incomes and education well above average.” Higher incomes and advanced educations are linked to greater vaccination rates, health officials have said. 

Although the reputation of Leelanau as a dream retirement spot has made it one of Michigan’s top counties for seniors, age alone isn't the deciding factor. . Half a dozen Michigan counties exceed Leelanau with even larger slices of seniors.

What’s different about Leelanau, Janik said, is the type of seniors it tends to have: affluent and educated.

Besides being drawn by the gorgeous geography, retirees who move there prize the county’s proximity to Traverse City, the site of two things that seniors invariably want: "a good airport and a good hospital,” Janik said. Munson Medical Center and Cherry Capital Airport fit the bill.

Munson, with 442 beds, is one of only two Level II trauma centers in the state north of Grand Rapids, the other being in the Upper Peninsula. Cherry Capital Airport is jointly owned by Leelanau County and neighboring Grand Traverse County.

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Adding to Leelanau's hefty cohort of affluent, educated retirees has been the county’s strong efforts to promote vaccinations, including among the 20 county employees, Janik said.

"I don't think anyone feels pressured to do it, but we did encourage it in our employees. And we have a very proactive senior program and health department. Both of them have been very active in promoting this,” he said.

The county's public health staff shifted radically from their usual promotions — for breast feeding, diabetes prevention, smoking cessation and others — into a full-court press on COVID-19 vaccinations, said Michelle Klein, personal health director for the Benzie-Leelanau District Health Department.

"We just have an excellent team that worked really, really hard to make the vaccine clinics available all over our county, and to publicize the sites," Klein said. "We've done some (vaccine clinics) in people's homes, in schools, in community centers. Our goal is always to make it as easy and convenient as possible for everyone."

Besides social media and newspaper notices, her department told the vaccine story through "a lot of just word of mouth, getting our staff to share information and overcome concerns with their own families and friends and anyone they know," she said.

Many business owners, especially in the hospitality niche, networked to offer convenient vaccination clinics at their worksites, said Sherri Campbell Fenton, managing owner of the Black Star Farms winery, tasting room, restaurant and bed-and-breakfast inn near Suttons Bay.

"We all knew what was happening downstate would be coming up here, and so everyone became extremely vigilant about mask-wearing for guests and protecting our employees. And I think all the business owners realized that to keep our people safe, we'd all better get vaccinated," Campbell Fenton said. 

The complex currently has 80 employees, down from its usual 100, she said. The firm did not require workers to be vaccinated, but "we did encourage it," Campbell Fenton said. The Inn at Black Star Farms was named in 2020 the nation's best "wine country hotel" by USA Today.  

Leelanau County's vigorous vaccine campaign may have kept a rash of COVID-19 cases from marring this paradise of lakes and sand, County Commissioner Patricia Soutas-Little said.

"I think we escaped a more serious outbreak early on because our public health people were so proactive," said Soutas-Little, who sits on the county health board. She and her husband are both retired from the faculty of Michigan State University's College of Engineering, so they represent exactly the type of educated retirees who've nudged their adopted county's vaccination rate to Michigan's peak.

Asked whether she got the vaccine, Soutas-Little doesn't hesitate to say, "Oh, my husband and I got it back in February."

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Find a COVID-19 vaccine near you

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