Data Notes for the Week of March 17, 2022

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You can find past issues on our data and dashboard page. The data below are from February 28—March 13.

Cases stabilized during this 14-day period with an average of 63 cases per day.

In last week’s snapshot, our 14-day average was 76 cases per day. The number of people hospitalized with COVID in Dane County hospitals decreased with an average of 42 people hospitalized each day.

Percent positivity during this 14-day period was 3.2% and an average of 1,958 tests were conducted per day. While we may not be capturing all cases due to people choosing not to get tested or people using home tests without receiving a follow-up PCR test, our percent positivity being below 5% indicates we are likely capturing most new COVID cases in our data.

62.7% of Dane County residents ages 5+ are up to date on their COVID vaccines.

20.8% are fully vaccinated but not up to date, 4.5% are partially vaccinated, and 12.0% are not vaccinated. Are you up to date on your vaccine? If not, you can get vaccinated at a quick and free site near you.

Over the past four weeks, cases decreased among most age groups.

Over the past four weeks, cases decreased among all age groups except ages 8-11 and 80+, who had stable case trends. Children ages 8-11 currently have the highest case rate at 21.5 per 100,000 per day, and the highest percent positivity at 5.1%.

The prevalence of the BA.2 Omicron subvariant has been increasing.

CDC estimates BA.2 is now 23.1% of new cases in the US, up from 13.7% last week, and 7.1% the week before that. BA.2 is more transmissible than BA.1, but the difference in transmissibility appears to be much smaller than the difference between BA.1 and the Delta variant. Also, reinfection with BA.2 after being infected with BA.1 appears to be rare, based on recent research from Denmark and Qatar. Our high vaccination rate also helps protect us against severe outcomes. We will continue to monitor variants closely in both the local data and global context. 

Note: The Illness After Vaccination data with case, hospitalization, and death rates by vaccination status will be reported next week instead of this week due to a delay in receiving required data files from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.