COVID-19 Updates - Resources and More and Data Galore!

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Shawano-Menominee Counties Health Department

– From where we sit in public health, now is a more important time than ever to work hard to protect our counties. COVID-19 has not gone away and remains very contagious. People are still at risk of infection and death from COVID-19. Since we must learn to co-exist with COVID-19 for a while, we need more information to help us make decisions. The more information we have available, the easier it will be to make decisions for our activities and our community.

Vicki Dantoin, Health Officer for Shawano and Menominee Counties says “Data will tell us when it is safer to have community events and gatherings. As of right now, it is not recommended to have community events and gatherings. Please consider the health of yourselves and the community as you consider whether you will hold or attend community events and gatherings.”

DATA UPDATES

On June 23, 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services released a COVID-19 Activity Level Data Dashboard. This dashboard will help us to see some statistics specific to Shawano and Menominee Counties. Additional indicators will be added to the dashboard as time progresses. ShawanoMenominee Counties Health Department will look to the COVID-19 Activity Level Data Dashboard to help make some local decisions. To support the increases in data availability, we would like to make some of these local statistics more accessible to you from our website. Please check our website for some updates, you may have already noticed some updates to our information. We will continue to add more data points if we find they are helpful to our local understanding of COVID-19. We will explain some of the updates below.

Our daily updates will continue Monday through Friday. This information includes the numbers of confirmed positives, negatives, tests, pending tests, hospitalizations, deaths, and recoveries. We have recently added a way to show the increase from the previous posting. We will also continue to include information on facility wide public health investigations for workplaces, long term care facilities, group housing, health care facilities, and other facilities.

We have added a few data points that you may find interesting. We have added information that shows number of tests in a 2 week timeframe, number of positive tests in a 2 week timeframe, and number of positive cases for each age range. We will update this information weekly or every other week depending on the set up of the data.

We are also exploring some additional data to make available for you. For example, in the future, we hope to add a map to show where cases are more prevalent. We may also include more information that mirrors what the Wisconsin Department of Health Services Dashboard shows.

Due to small numbers of cases in Menominee County, we are limited with the data we can provide to make sure no one is personally identifiable. The Menominee County daily update will continue and we will add Menominee County data as we are able.

RESOURCE UPDATES

In order to keep similar pieces of information together without having to scroll through all of our information on one page, we have moved some of our other information. You can now access our press releases and other guidance and resources on a separate tab. You can access the tab by clicking the link on the main COVID-19 page or on the side bar.

In addition, we have moved and added some information related to symptoms, screening, testing, quarantine, and isolation. Feel free to access the Frequently Asked Questions tab to find this information if you are sick, if you have been exposed, or if you test positive for COVID-19.

Finally, we added a risk tab that shows risks related to activities and behaviors such as events/gatherings, travel, face covering use, and physical distancing use. At this time, risk is not 0, but we decrease risk by taking precautions ourselves and as a community. This information is intended to help you think about your risks if you participate in any activities or behaviors.

We hope these updates are helpful for you. We also thank you for your work to help decrease the spread of COVID-19 and prevent deaths in our community. We will make it through this pandemic together!

Be safe and be well!

Stay up to date with Shawano-Menominee Counties Health Department:

Shawano County Data Updates

Shawano-Menominee Counties Frequently Asked Questions (Are you concerned that you or someone you know may have COVID-19?)

Shawano-Menominee Counties Guidance and Resources (includes our press releases and other resources and guidance)

Shawano-Menominee Counties Risks (What are the risks associated with various activities and behaviors?)

Menominee County Data Updates

Or follow Shawano-Menominee Counties Health Department on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SMCHD/

Other COVID-19 Resources

https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/covid-19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019