Public Health Madison & Dane County

Read the 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 (data from February 1 through February 14):

There was a significant decrease in cases during this 14-day period.

Dane County’s 14-day average number of cases is 95 per day, down from 113 last snapshot. In this period, there were 1,328 total cases. Percent positivity is at 1.4%.

During this period, 39% of cases were UW-Madison students or staff. 65% of tests were conducted by UW’s University Health Services. When we exclude cases and tests from University Health Services, Dane County still has a low percent positivity at 2.6%. This is not surprising, as UW is doing an incredible amount of testing, which supports rapid identification of people with COVID-19 and helps to contain spread of the disease through contact tracing, isolation and quarantine support. We’re monitoring the situation closely for evidence of increasing case counts in other age groups. We are not currently seeing any such increase among other age groups.

15.3% of the Dane County population has received at least one dose of vaccine.

The number of people who have received at least one dose of vaccine in the past nine weeks is now more than double the number of people who have gotten COVID-19 over the past year.

As of February 15, 119,733 doses have been administered to 83,732 people. For the latest vaccination numbers, see the Department of Health Services’ website. See our vaccination page for more information about currently eligible and soon to be eligible groups.

15 people (1.1% of all cases) were associated with assisted living or skilled nursing facilities.

This number of cases associated with a long-term care facility or skilled nursing facility hasn’t been this low since September 24. There has been a large decrease in the number of cases linked to long-term care facilities over the past three months. Much of this is likely due to the overall decreasing trend of cases we’ve seen in Dane County, but it is also likely that vaccine administration over the past two months has helped to reduce the number of cases to an average of just one per day during this 14-day period. More than half of all Dane County residents age 65+ have received at least one dose of vaccine.

People in Dane County who have died from COVID-19 are still largely people associated with assisted living facilities. Of the 51 people who we have lost in January and February, two-thirds were residents of a long-term care facility.