Data Notes for the Week of August 10

Today we released this week’s data snapshot. If you’re new to the data snapshot, we publish a weekly summary of the status for each of our metrics (you can find past issues on our data and metrics page). We have a few notes for this week’s issue:

Our average number of cases per day is still red and at the same level as last week.

The number of cases per day metric was red in the last data snapshot, and it remained red during this 14-day period. Cases per day ranged from 15 to 80, with an average of 50 cases per day. Last week’s average number of cases per day was also 50. In this 14-day period there were 700 total cases:

• Of all 700 cases, 466 (67%) were tested at community testing sites (462 at the Alliant Energy Center).
• Of 625 people who have been fully interviewed so far, 233 (37%) reported attending a gathering or party with people outside of their household.
• Of 625 people fully interviewed so far, 357 (57%) identified the likely source of infection as close contact with another lab-confirmed COVID-19 case.
• Of 625 people fully interviewed so far, 86 (14%) were associated with a cluster: 22 from workplaces, 18 from childcare facilities, 12 from congregate facilities, 10 from bars and restaurants, 6 from large gatherings (such as weddings or house parties), 5 from supported living services for adults, 4 from sports teams, 4 from youth camps, 2 from college-aged housing (including sororities, fraternities, near-campus apartments), and 3 from other clusters.
  • Of the 22 cases from childcare facilities and youth camps, 9 were children and 13 were adults.

The lab timeliness and contact tracing metric improved once again and turned yellow.

Lab timeliness (how quickly labs are reported to us) and contact tracing (how quickly we can reach out to cases) are combined into one metric because lab timeliness directly affects contact tracing. This metric has continued to improve: 75% of cases were contacted by public health within 48 hours of being tested, compared to 64% from our last snapshot. This metric will turn green when we’re able to contact 85% of all cases within 48 hours of when they got tested.

This is great news! This metric hasn’t been yellow since the June 29 data snapshot. 87% of samples had a result and were reported back to us within 24 hours of testing. 77% of people were interviewed within 24 hours of us receiving the lab result. People are not only getting their results fast, but they’re getting tested fast too: the median number of days between symptom onset to getting a lab test completed is only one day!

Four out of every ten people with COVID-19 do not know where they could have been exposed.

The community spread metric increased again this week and still remains red. This week, 40% of people with COVID-19 did not know where they could have been exposed, compared to 39% from last week’s snapshot. A high percent of cases with no known route of disease transmission means there is likely a large number of individuals unknowingly spreading the virus in the community, which makes isolation and contact tracing much more difficult.

We will be moving to a new publishing schedule.

Starting next week, we will begin releasing this weekly snapshot on Thursdays instead of Mondays. As we wrote on last week’s snapshot, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) recently debuted an activity level dashboard by county, which we incorporated as a tool to help us determine when we may need to “rebound,” i.e., tighten restrictions or move backwards to a previous phase.

We are aware that DHS will be adding additional county-level metrics to their dashboard in the near future, and these metrics are updated on their website every Wednesday. We’d like to incorporate the DHS metrics into our weekly snapshot, so we will be shifting our release date to Thursdays in order to include the most up-to-date information. Our next snapshot will be released on Thursday, August 20.