Wisconsin Covid Update: What’s next?

The federal government has announced the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency will end May 11. In Wisconsin, case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19 are significantly lower than they were during the surge in late 2021 and early 2022, and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) has been making plans to move away from an emergency response to the virus.

“We’re going to continue to track COVID. We know that the results and in terms of reporting on COVID are a little skewed because of the availability of over the counter tests and those not being reported. But what I would recommend people to do is to stay, stay attuned to the news and understand, go up on our website and see what the cases are,” says DHS Deputy Secretary Deb Standridge.

So what is the best way to go about living life after May 11^th?

“I would advise, as the public health emergency wanes down, to remember to stay vaccinated, to stay up to date on vaccinations should they begin to experience symptoms, to get tested and to seek medical care if they feel that they do have COVID. This, while we know that COVID is, is going to be part of our lives going forward, it doesn’t mean that we turn a blind eye to it,” continues Standridge.

“We’re going to we’re going to be consolidating a lot of the pages for the COVID 19 into something that’s going to be very easy for Wisconsinites to be able to go up and access data. It’s going to go from daily probably to weekly, if not more,” said Standridge.

“The main message is that people need to take care of their health. They still need to be aware that COVID does exist in the United States. It exists in our communities, even though the data may not be as frequent as usual. They need to monitor their own health like we would do for any sort of respiratory disease, any communicable disease,” finishes Standridge.