I ran the numbers for counties through Monday in Wisconsin on COVID-19 cases, and to no surprise, counties with UW campuses have had significant increases in the last few weeks as college students come back to school. The biggest jump has been around the Madison campus, which reversed weeks of lower cases in Dane County.
And other UW campuses also have seen a big jump. All five of the counties listed in these charts are place with sizable UW campuses, and you can see when the students got back.
As I mentioned a few days ago, when you create a situation where UW campuses are increasingly reliant on tuition and dorm revenues to survive, it puts the schools in a situation where they feel they have to put students on campuses if it is at all possible. And the record high levels of new COVID cases are the unsurprising result.
But it's not just college towns that are seeing cases hit record levels. The I-41 corridor continues to get record cases, and not just in the Oshkosh area. Appleton and the rest of Outagamie County is doing especially bad.
This culminates with Brown County having more than 600 new cases reported last week, surpassing the previous highs that were reached in later April and early May, when meat packing plants around Titletown were having huge breakouts.
While most of the college towns have yet to see a significant increase in hospitalizations (partly due to the younger population, but also because it seems to take 2-4 weeks for the full cycle of COVID to run its way through people), that's not the case in the Fox Valley. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services says the number of people hospitalized in that part of Wisconsin has more than quadrupled over the last 2 weeks.
There is one area in Wisconsin where COVID is on the wane - most of Southeastern Wisconsin, and especially Milwaukee County. The county with the most people in Wisconsin is having its lowest numbers of new cases in 3 months, and accounted for less than 1 in 10 new cases in the state last week.
But the Milwaukee County numbers are small solace for much of the rest of the state, who is seeing COVID come back at levels that is giving the state national notice.
And we still got 2 weeks where students have to stay in school so the UW can get its tuition, room and board. Oh, and then it'll get colder with more people going inside after that. Hoo boy.
And that's before we go inside for good in about a month. Hoo boy.
No doubt republicans are salivating at the demise of higher education as they know the uneducated will willing vote for them.
ReplyDeleteOh, you can bet the Bradleys and their GOP puppets are going to try to use this mess as a reason to put some Shock Doctrine on the UW. In reality, it shows just how you can't rely on the private sector and tuition payments to maintain a high-quality product (especially at campuses that are outside of Madison).
DeleteIt's also a reminder that Trump and the GOP started blowing off COVID-19 and holding their "get us back to work" rallies when it became obvious that the early victims were mostly People of Color in big cities and in blue states. Disgusting selfishness.