COVID up throughout Wisconsin, but it's worst in Trump Country

With a big jump in COVID cases over the last week (mostly due to children coming back to school), I awaited today's weekly summary by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services that breaks down cases to the county level. And it definitely told a story.

A majority of counties had a significant increase in COVID cases, and none had a significant decline. And the number of "critically high" red counties went from 2 to 8, indicating that more than 1% of the county's population had caught COVID in the last 2 weeks.

As you may have noticed, those most-infected counties are entirely in rural Wisconsin. The largest cities in this list of counties are...Rice Lake and Antigo.

Rate of new COVID cases per 100,000, 9/8 to 9/21
Rusk County 1,589.4
Barron County 1,371.0
Forest County 1,230.7
Washburn Co. 1,185.9
Buffalo County 1,169.6
Oconto County 1,140.6
Green Lake Co. 1,047.8
Trempealeau Co. 1,026.2
Langlade Co. 996.1
Sawyer County 983.6

And no surprise, all 10 of these counties are Trump Country. The former president carried all 10 of these counties by double digits, getting between 56.1% (Sawyer) to 69.9% (Oconto). And 7 of the 10 still have less than half of their population fully vaccinated.

That might make you want to hesitate before checking out the Fall color in up in those counties, or at least avoid eating and drinking inside of a local supper club. And maybe a whole lot of red counties (both politically and for COVID cases) need to take a little better care of themselves as the weather starts to cool.