Public Health Madison & Dane County

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 increased for the first time in seven weeks.

Cases per day ranged from 16 to 78 with an average of 45 cases per day. Last week’s average number of cases per day was 41. In this 14-day period, there were 632 total cases:

• Of all 632 cases, 363 (57%) were tested at community testing sites and 92 (15%) were tested by University Health Services.
• Of 574 people who have been fully interviewed so far, 206 (36%) reported attending a gathering or party with people outside of their household.
• Of 574 people fully interviewed so far, 303 (53%) identified the likely source of infection as close contact with another lab-confirmed COVID-19 case.
• Of 574 people fully interviewed so far, 108 (19%) were associated with a cluster: 48 from college-aged housing, 21 from workplaces, 12 from congregate facilities, 11 from bars and restaurants, 10 from childcare facilities, 5 from weddings (all of which took place outside of Dane County), and 1 from gyms.
  • Of the 10 cases from childcare facilities, 5 were children and 5 were adults.
  • Of the 21 cases from workplaces, 5 cases were from more public-facing businesses (such as hotels and golf clubs) and 16 were from less public-facing businesses (such as manufacturing facilities and contractors).

UW-Madison students and staff make up over a quarter of Dane County cases.

During this 14-day period, 163 UW students and 8 staff (171 total) tested positive, making up 27% of our total cases.

Of the 171 UW cases in this 14-day period:

• 92 (54%) were tested by UHS, 64 (37%) were tested at the Alliant Energy Center, and 15 (9%) were tested at other sites.
• 159 (93%) were between the ages of 18-22.
• 48 (28%) were associated with a cluster: 47 from college-aged housing (including sororities, fraternities, near-campus apartments) and 1 from a workplace.

The target for grades 3-5 was not sustained this week.

The K-12 school metrics are detailed on our website. K-2 is currently open, having met its target. August 22 was the first day the 14-day average was 39 or less, which had started the clock for Grades 3-5, but this level was not maintained the following week. The clock will start again once Dane County’s 14-day average hits 39 or fewer cases per day.

The community spread metric holds steady for another week.

Four out of every ten people with COVID-19 do not know where they could have been exposed, same as last week. A high percent of cases who don’t know how they got sick means there likely are people unknowingly spreading the virus in the community.

Dane County is still classified as “high activity level” on the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) COVID-19 Activity Level Tracker.

Our Forward Dane metric for cases (see the first section of this blog) accounts for burden but not trajectory. The DHS metric combines the burden of cases over a two-week period (number of cases per 100,000 residents) and the trajectory, which measures the percent change in cases from the previous week to the current week and whether that change is statistically significant.

As of the DHS update on 9/2/20, Dane County has a high burden of 120 cases per 100,000 residents, and a growing trajectory in the number of cases from the most recent 7-day period compared to the prior 7-day period. This puts us at a high activity level. We want to reduce our activity level in order to better control the spread of COVID-19 in our community.