Wis COVID cases head to the sticks

I wanted to follow up with my county-by-county look at Wisconsin COVID cases that I tend to do around every Monday. It's a bit better news overall, in no small part due to the lowest amount of new cases in more than a month being reported today. It's still a significantly elevated amount of new cases over the last 7 days, at more than 5,900. But Milwaukee County saw a solid decline of 474 in the number of new cases, and accounted for the lowest proportion of new cases in the state since the pandemic broke out.

Several larger Wisconsin counties that had seen big jumps in new cases in recent weeks were at slightly lower levels in the last 7 days. And even though Dane County had a small increase in new cases over the last week, it is still well below where it was before the County and state put in a mask mandate in mid-July.

It's still not good, but it's better than we were seeing from these places last week or the week before.

But cases have remained high statewide because the virus has been breaking out in areas that it hadn't been heavily hitting before, and is as bad as ever in Walworth County, which now has the 6th-highest rate of total COVID infections in the state.

COVID is also hitting further north and west in the state. Note the growth of new cases in these larger population counties that started rising in late June and has stayed high for the last 6 weeks.

And I also wanted to show these 2 smaller Wisconsin counties in western and northern Wisconsin, as COVID-19 has packed a significant punch in these places as the Summer has gone on.

So COVID has definitely become a statewide pandemic, but some areas seem to be taking mask mandates and other anti-COVID measures more seriously than others. And it might make for a sad experiment in the coming weeks as we get to compare places like Dane County, Green Bay and Milwaukee that have had mask mandates for a while, and outstate places that won't enforce the mandate and look like this.

Be smart out there folks.