Data Notes for the Week of March 11

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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).

This issue has new measures, as described in Forward Dane.

Specific thresholds have been removed from measures, new measures that are more relevant to our current situation have been added, and measures that are now less relevant or have not been as informative as we had hoped have been discontinued. In case you missed it, we put out a news release to explain what’s in the Forward Dane update.

Dane County vaccinators are making great progress getting people vaccinated.

There are dozens of vaccinators in Dane County who are working together to quickly vaccinate people in our county. 22.6% of the Dane County population has at least one dose of vaccine. 14.5% of the Dane County population has completed their series. 77.7% of Dane County people ages 65+ have at least one dose of vaccine.

Today the Wisconsin Department of Health Services announced the next group of people who will be eligible for vaccine, beginning March 29. This group includes people with nearly 20 different medical conditions. See Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ website for eligibility details.

There was a significant decrease in cases associated with UW-Madison (UW) during this 14-day period, and no significant change in non-UW cases.

32% of cases were UW students or staff. 71% of tests were conducted by UW’s University Health Services (UHS). When excluding cases and tests from UHS, Dane County still has a low percent positivity of 1.8%. Maintaining a high level of testing is important for quickly identifying people who have COVID-19, ensuring they can quickly isolate, and rapidly starting contact tracing. We are happy to see such a high level of testing is happening in Dane County, particularly on campus! If you need testing, there are lots of options throughout the county.

The 2-week average daily case count is 61 and it had no significant change during this two-week period. In this 14-day period there were 857 total confirmed cases and 22 total probable cases. At least 100 (11%) of these cases were associated with a cluster and/or a facility investigation. We also recently added probable cases to our dashboard on the “New people and 7 day average of people by date of test result” graph on page two and the “Number of people who died by month and year” graph on page seven.

We continue to see few cases among people in assisted living or skilled nursing facilities.

11 people who tested positive (1.3% of all cases) were associated with assisted living or skilled nursing facilities. Nearly four out of every five Dane County residents age 65+ have received at least one dose of vaccine.

The rate of COVID-19 deaths among confirmed cases in Dane County is significantly lower than the rate for Wisconsin overall.

There have been 303 Dane County residents who have lost their lives to COVID-19 over the past year. 74% of these deaths occurred between November 1, 2020 to January 31, 2021. Of the 64 people who we have lost in 2021, just over two-thirds were residents of a long-term care facility.