Something in the Water?

I don't know if this was a local thing, but I remember when, anytime two or more visibly pregnant women were in the same room, somebody would say,  "I hear there's a lot of that going around lately, must be something in the water."

It is my understanding that COVID-19 is a respiratory illness that is spread by people breathing each other's air, but I'm beginning to wonder if there is another vector at work here that has been overlooked.  I don't know about their greater metro areas, but I'm pretty sure that Chicago has more people per square mile than Detroit within the city limits.  Furthermore, both Illinois and Michigan started their social distancing efforts about the same time, so Illinois should have more cases than Michigan, but it doesn't.  Why do you suppose that is?

Another thing is that everybody says social distancing is working, but the numbers keep rising every day.  In Michigan, the rate of increasing has increased every day but one.  Although a certain amount of surge was to be expected, it seems that should have petered out by now.  It must take the virus a week or two to incubate because people who might have been exposed are told to quarantine themselves for 14 days.  If you haven't developed symptoms by then, they figure that you must not have it.  Now that we have been social distancing for over a month, it seems that everybody who had the bug before the hammer came down should have been identified by now.  While nobody has claimed that social distancing was a perfect solution, it was supposed to slow the spread of the virus not accelerate it.

I'm not one of those paranoid freaks who believe that everything bad is caused by some evil conspiracy, at least not anymore, but I can't help wondering if there is something going on here that we don't know about.  Maybe nobody knows about it, or maybe somebody does and they're not telling us.  While Trump undoubtedly could have handled it better, I find it hard to believe that he caused the whole thing all by himself, or that merely voting him out of office in November will make it go away all by itself.