After a day of sunshine, Metro Detroit will have a cloudy Sunday night. A stray flurry will be possible over the Thumb, but it will be a relatively quiet night for weather in Southeast Michigan.

Since the middle of November, the entire region has returned to levels similar to those seen in October. Governors have used the declining numbers to justify their divergent approaches to fighting the pandemic, even jousting at times. As the pandemic crept into communities across the Midwest, more people had loved ones, friends or acquaintances fall ill or die. Many health experts warned that the region was ripe for widespread infections, especially as the weather cooled and people gathered inside, making it easier for the coronavirus to spread. Other experts say some pockets of people, such as those who work in meatpacking plants where infections were widespread, had experienced such high rates of infections that the virus has slowed.

Now the coronavirus outbreak is heating up fast in smaller cities in the heartland, often in conservative corners of America where anti-mask sentiment runs high. Wisconsin is averaging more than 2,000 new cases a day over the last week, compared with 675 three weeks earlier. Health officials said if virus cases in these neighborhoods continue to build, the city might roll back the reopening in some places and require businesses to close back down. In Joplin, Missouri, a mask ordinance was allowed to expire in mid-August as virus fatigue grew. Since then, the number of positive cases there and in surrounding Jasper County — a deeply conservative county that Trump won by more than 50 percentage points over Hillary Clinton in 2016 — has risen about 80%.

More than 100 damaging wind reports have already come in. Wind damage swaths that extend more than 240 miles and contain wind gusts of at least 58 mph or greater along most of the length classify these wind events as derechos. Friday night's storm also resulted in more than 200,000 power outages across Wisconsin and Michigan as damaging winds swept through nearly 500 miles in just 10 hours. The term "derecho" is Spanish for straight and is used because these events tend to cause straight-line wind damage. According to a 2005 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, there were 153 fatalities that resulted from derecho events between 1986 and 2003.