Wisconsin making great progress on COVID in recent weeks. But can it continue?

As January turned into February, Wisconsin continued to improve in controlling and preventing COVID infections. Cases and (finally!) deaths fell to multi-month lows last week.

In addition, Wisconsin has had a significant turnaround in getting our people vaccinated against the virus. In mid-January, the state was among the lowest in America in the percentage of residents getting a shot, but it has caught up in a big way since then.

Wisconsin is now leading the nation in the average number of COVID-19 vaccine shots being administered daily — a massive increase that comes as the Evers administration is expanding its rollout to include free vaccination clinics across the state.

The state's vaccine rollout has improved among national rankings significantly in recent days, now 10th in administering a first dose to residents, and 16th in the total number of doses administered — up from nearly last fewer than two weeks ago.

On a seven-day rolling average basis, Wisconsin is now administering roughly 6,170 shots per million residents per day. The next fastest state, Hawaii, is administering roughly 5,830 shots per million residents on average, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

You can see the leap in this chart from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

However, that increasing number of vaccinations may be hitting a limit, as any backlog of vaccines that may have existed in Wisconsin is now gone, and some places aren't getting much (if anything) to replace the shots they have been giving. Here was a story on Channel 27 in Madison Monday, which discussed how a Baraboo pharmacy can't do many planned vaccinations for this week. No question that things look a lot better today than it did a month ago when it comes to Wisconsin's COVID situation. But it is tenuous and we cannot drop our guard now that cases are going down. Not only could COVID re-emerge if too many people ignore mitigation measures like mask-wearing and social distancing, but we also need to make sure that vaccines are able to continue to get into places where shots can be given to people. And that will be an ongoing battle that has to be fought for the next several months.