Yes, there's a lot of COVID here. Vaxxed/boosted? It's merely annoying. But if not...

Hey look, Wisconsin is Number 1 in America! Oh wait...

Which means we had the highest per-capita rates of reported new COVID cases in America over the 7 days between last Friday and yesterday. Sort of. As the Wisconsin Department of Health Services noted, some of this is due to catch-up from positive cases in prior weeks that they're just now getting into the system.

Your #COVID19_WI update, and a reminder. As a result of the new auto-import process, we expected #COVID19 data to be temporarily elevated while backlogged cases are brought into the live system: https://t.co/H8Z655kQYN pic.twitter.com/Isip4zvVY7

— WIDeptHealthServices (@DHSWI) January 17, 2022

That accounted for more than 38,500 "new" cases on Sunday, which was 20,000-25,000 more than any other day. So you can expect that 7-day average to decline by around 3,000 or 4,000 when you next see it on Monday for that reason alone.

But 13,000 cases a day is still double the previous record of 6,500 a day that we had in November 2020. That being said, the amount of Wisconsinites dying from COVID in this latest wave is less than half of what it was at the worst of 2020.

This indicates that vaccinations are strongly succeeding at keeping people from having complications from COVID, even with much fewer restrictions on access to events and places compared to the end of 2020. And another release from the Wisconsin DHS backs that up, which shows that despite the large increase in COVID cases across all vaccination types, it's still the unvaccinated that are more likely to get the virus, and are MUCH more likely to have worse outcomes once they do get it.

And that's even more the case in heavily vaccinated and 64% boosted Dane County, as the Dane County Department of Public Health showed this week. Despite a large increase in cases, the disparities were clear for December.

The numbers are really clear - you get vaxxed and boosted, wear masks in crowded indoor situations, and bad things don't happen to you with COVID. If you don't, then they very well might, and it is affecting the rest of us with higher infection rates and increased absenteeism from work.

And I certainly don't think we need to "respect the rights" of the people who are allowing this pandemic and the related crowding of hospitals to happen. We need to keep calling it out, because the data and the disparities are obvious, and it is threatening the economic Biden Boom that we saw for most of 2021.