Wisconsin COVID numbers reverse as June ends. And so will our recovery

It's not been a good week on the COVID-19 front in America. Certainly not in much of the South and Southwest, but also a bad week in Wisconsin. We had our highest number of new COVID cases in 4 weeks, with nearly 400 positive tests a day.

Worse, the increase is NOT because of more testing. In fact, Wisconsin had its fewest amount of tests in more than a month, and the rate of positive tests bumped back above 4%.

The one positive is that deaths from COVID dropped to a multi-month low last week. But you have to worry that this number goes back up in July, based on the typical time span between infection and death.

If you break it down within the state, you can see that Milwaukee County's amount of new cases is still at multi-week lows, but increases in Dane County and the rest of the state are the reason for the recent COVID resurgence in our state.

Now righties may try to blame the racial justice protests in Madison for that recent increase, but it seems more likely that it is due to scenes like this.

Lines to bars in Madison are already long on this Thursday.

There aren’t masks... pic.twitter.com/jE0nadClM3

— Lawrence Andrea (@lawrencegandrea) June 18, 2020

Increases in COVID-19 cases in La Crosse, Wausau and Madison all are most concentrated in the 20-29 age group.

I am not a scientist, so you may throw this out if you want to. But it's what I think.

It's bars.

— Rob Mentzer (@robertmentzer) June 25, 2020

That data is a reason why Dane County dialed back on some of its reopening plans in recent days, reducing limitations on some private gatherings and trying to prevent people from standing in bars and restaurants.

It's frustrating, as I was hoping the downward trend in cases and rate of positive tests that we saw in much of June meant that we would continue to take steps back toward pre-COVID times. I wanted this thing to get crushed, resulting in a subdued but otherwise normal Summer. In previous times in this country, we would have had leaders and citizens who took on that challenge, and beat it.

But instead, 2020 America continues to bungle its way through the pandemic. We have a President and far too many other political leaders choosing to put it "out of sight, out of mind", and chose to have a facade of economic recovery instead of real success in having this country physically heal. Which would have been the best way for it to economically heal.

Then far too many weak people followed the example from our "leaders" and had that hubris as well, and backslid when it came to taking actions that decreased their chances of catching the disease. Now it means that this country and this state is likely to have COVID hold it back for the 2nd half of 2020, and a whole lot more people are going to lose their "freedoms" due to a bad economy and bad health.