COVID got worse in September in Wisconsin. Especially in Trumpy, unvaxxed places

With September's end, it seems to be a good benchmark in assessing Wisconsin's COVID situation, particularly given that we reached multi-month highs in cases.

September also ended with a notorious milestone, as 8,000 Wisconsinites have now died of COVID, and the last 500 deaths have happened in a much quicker time frame than the previous 500.

Deaths from COVID, Wisconsin
7,000 deaths - 7,500 deaths 154 days
7,500 deaths - 8,000 deaths 53 days

Along the same lines, it is startling to realize that the number of new COVID cases in Wisconsin over the last 2 months is starting to approach the total number of cases that we had over the first 7 months of 2021.

New COVID cases 2021, Wisconsin
Jan 1 - July 31 141,999
Aug 1 – Sept 30 108,320

At 2,500 cases a day (our current average), that means those numbers should equalize in the next 2 weeks. Not a good thing at all.

It does look like new cases were declining over the last part of September, until over 3,300 new cases were reported on the 30th. Hopefully that’s just a one-day blip that might reflect the clean up of data at the end of a month, but it still tells us we need to be on guard.

And that’s especially true in areas where vaccinations aren’t happening. The evidence continues to get stronger that both types of unvaccinated Wisconsinites are behind the recent spike. Not only does the biggest increase in cases come overwhelmingly from kids under 18 (shown in blue in the first picture), but for the first time in this pandemic, children between ages 9 and 13 are getting more COVID cases that the (vaccine-eligible) group of older children.

There also seems to be an echo of the kids getting COVID that’s reflected with new cases among people aged 35-44 (in light green in the first picture) being higher than those 25-34 (in red), which also hasn’t happened in the previous 18 months.

Break the case trends down to the county level, and there’s a pretty clear regional divide. All counties have high levels of cases, but the ones in red have had 1% of their population come down with COVID in the last 2 weeks.

See all 21 of those counties in the red with “critically high” cases? All 21 voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, in a state that went for Joe Biden.

In addition, only 2 of those counties are above the statewide rate of 53.8% completion of the COVID vaccination cycle, with 15 falling below 50% vaxxed.

Seems pretty simple – if you’re vaccinated and not putting yourself in places of large-scale exposure, you’re a lot less likely to get COVID, and a lot less likely to have bad health outcomes if you happen to get COVID.

If you’re not doing these things, well, bad things are much more likely to follow. Choose wisely.