School's back, and COVID is leaping all over Wisconsin

We already knew that there would be a significant change in COVID-19 cases in a few parts of Wisconsin, as college students headed back to school. And that certainly was true in Dane County, where several fraternities and sororities have been ordered to have their members quarantine for the next 2 weeks after so many cases broke out at the UW-Madison campus in the first week of classes.

This has essentially erased all the progress Dane County had made in the last 2 months in containing the virus.

Likewise, it's pretty easy to tell when students got back to the UW campuses at Eau Claire, La Crosse and Oshkosh. Take a look on the right-hand edges of this chart.

But it's not just places that have college students that saw spikes in COVID cases in the first week of September. Brown County has had significant breakouts at the Green Bay prison recently, and new cases are at levels that we haven't seen since May, when food plants were causing the Titletown area to have the worst rate of infections in the state.

Traveling down I-41 from Brown County, we see that Outagamie County is also having a spike in COVID cases over the last 3 weeks, with the highest numbers coming in the last few days. In addition, Fond du Lac and Washington Counties have stayed elevated.

And the worst part of this is that not only did the number of new cases go back up to 5,500 in the last week (through Saturday), but the number of tests continued to decline. This means the percentage of positive tests keeps going up, to 9.5%, our highest rate in 4 months.

None of these numbers are good, and with more people traveling on Labor Day Weekend and schools staying open (because the tourism businesses and colleges need the money), I don't see where it gets much better on the COVID in the coming weeks. Oh, and have we mentioned that Fall and Winter is coming?