Wisconsin health department adopts CDC metrics for measuring COVID-19 risk and spread
Devi Shastri
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services made several changes to its public COVID-19 data pages Thursday, most notably by adopting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's system for indicating risk and community-level spread of the virus.
The CDC breaks down COVID-19 levels into high, medium and low tiers, taking into account both local disease spread and hospital capacity. The new levels replace the states COVID-19 activity levels that the state used to feature on its site by region and county.
"We really value that CDC has incorporated (hospital capacity data) into the community levels and want to encourage people to use that method for their decision-making," said Traci DeSalvo, director of DHS's bureau of communicable diseases.
DHS also updated its data on rates of illness, hospitalization and death among fully-vaccinated and people who were not fully-vaccinated.
The newly added data for January, February and March 2022 comes after delays from "technical difficulties" with how the data was gathered and stored.
According to the March 2022 data, people who were not fully-vaccinated were being diagnosed with COVID-19 at similar rates as those who were fully-vaccinated. The state health department attributed that to the spread of the virus' highly-transmissible Omicron variant.
The more concerning differences emerged in the rates of hospitalization and death: people who were not fully-vaccinated were hospitalized at a rate 2.4 times higher than fully-vaccinated people, and they died at a 3.4 times higher rate.
"Our data are continuing to show the value of vaccines to really prevent those severe cases of COVID-19 and really helping to reduce morbidity and mortality from this illness," DeSalvo said.
Also as part of the Thursday update, the health department scrapped several charts that were previously available on its site. Most notable, it dropped data visualizations showing the percentage of cases in group housing and the percentage of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in group housing settings, such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
DeSalvo said the state health department is still collecting information on outbreaks in long-term care facilities and hasn't changed the definition of what counts as an outbreak. That definition is one or more cases.
But she said the department removed group-housing-specific charts on cases and deaths because there have been fewer interviews happening with COVID-19 patients as the pandemic has progressed. The data has become more unreliable.
For current data on outbreaks in nursing homes, the state health department is now pointing people to federal data on the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' website.
That data includes vaccination rates and weekly case and death totals at nursing homes. However, it does not include totals for assisted living facilities, which are not subject to the same federal reporting requirements as nursing homes and which are regulated by the state.
Sarah Volpenhein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.
Contact Devi Shastri at 414-224-2193 or DAShastri@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @DeviShastri.