GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – COVID-19 cases in Wisconsin continue to dwindle following the peak of the omicron variant surge.
Is that decrease giving local health care workers some relief?
Dr. Brad Burmeister with Bellin Health tells FOX 11 things are heading in the right direction.
“For the state as a whole, we actually have about half the number of people in our hospitals as we did in January. Locally it’s maybe down a third, not quite good as the state as a whole, but clearly a much better position than we had been in January.”
And with that a lot of people are letting their guard down when it comes to masking.
Dr. Burmeister says we should ere on the side of caution with unmasking as it’s still an important and effective mitigation strategy.
“Even though our trajectory looks very good, we still have a very high burden of disease with a lot of what we call “community spread,” meaning that when people get COVID, they don’t often know who it exactly came from and that contact tracing is nearly impossible because the disease burden was so significant that the chance that you encounter someone at random just doing your daily activities was very high.”
So will there ever be a good time to unmask?
“We’re clearly heading into an area again where masking is going to be less of an important tool. Masking is going to be important when we have a high case burden in our community, it’s going to have a greater impact on our lives and improving things and when cases are very rare, it’s going to have less of an importance but from a purely mathematically sense, that transmissibility part of the equation is an exponent, so even a small change we can make to transmissibility has an exponential impact on our lives.”
At this point in the pandemic, Dr. Burmeister agrees that we are all just going to have to live with COVID.
“We know that there are risk mitigation strategies that can help us live lives as close to normal as possible while we continue to navigate this pandemic and the more people who follow those recommendations, the more effective we’re going to be as a community in preventing suffering while having as close to normal lives at this point.”
And with that, a lot of people have travel plans for upcoming spring break.
Dr. Burmeister has a few suggestions for those traveling safely:
Know the requirements of your destination as far as vaccine and masking requirements
If traveling internationally, know requirements to get back into the U.S.
Follow your destination’s public health measures
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