COVID cases, community levels dropping in Wisconsin. But some severity still happening

Hadn't mentioned the trends in COVID cases in Wisconsin in a while, so wanted to briefly touch on that.

The good news is that the number of new reported COVID cases in Wisconsin continues to fall, although the 7-day average is still elevated, at nearly 1,400 cases.

It also looks like the number of Wisconsinites hospitalized has plateaued after rising through much of May. Combined with the decline in reported cases, this has led to the number of counties with “high” community levels falling from 18 at the end of May to 4 today, with a majority of counties now listed as having “low” levels.

But the higher hospitalizations of May are now translating into more COVID deaths than had in April. It’s still nothing near what we had at the start of 2022, and similar to what we were at this time last year. But it's also not single digits, and we're still seeing 4-5 Wisconsinites die every day from this virus.

Perhaps the lower number of (reported) cases and good weather of recent days are going to lessen the chances of more COVID cases and deaths, at least through the next few weeks. But as we've seen far too often, just when we think we've seen the final downturn, some goofy variant comes along to annoy us further. So it's at least worth staying aware of the numbers, even if they're not the headline-grabbers that we saw in other times.