MADISON, WI (WTAQ) — Two years ago this month we found ourselves in the first week of Governor Tony Evers Executive Order #72, which declared an emergency in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, a lot has happened, and a lot has changed, and now it’s changing again. DHS Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ryan Westergaard says that the pandemic may not be over, but we’re entering a new phase.
“I don’t have a sense of when we’re going to say the pandemic is over, if we ever do,” Westergaard told WTAQ in a Wednesday interview. “We are going to be shifting, we’re already shifting, in how we’re going to manage and approach it.”
It means taking advantage of the infrastructure and procedures developed during the height of the pandemic.
“The virus is in more of a steady state rather than continually spiking, leading to crisis after crisis,” Westergaard explained. “We’ll now be equipped with all of the tools we developed going forward.”
Westergaard says COVID-19 is going to be around forever in some form or another, much like the flu and the common cold.
“We accomplished a lot and we prevented a lot of infection,” Westergaard said when asked to reflect on the early stages of the pandemic. “But we didn’t stop transmission. It continued to spread around the world, as it does now.”
During the early months of the pandemic, the public discussion around the virus changed. Political divisions quickly appeared, and opposing groups each ramped up rhetoric over how best to deal with the virus. It was something, Westergaard says, that public health didn’t account for.
“We need to get better skills as to how best participate, in a productive way, in an environment where a lot of people have different opinions,” said Westergaard. “And a few people are bad actors who intentionally spread misinformation.”
Executive order #72, which was signed on March 12th of 2020, came the same week as a series of emergency orders limiting mass gatherings of 50 or more, a temporary ban on evictions, and most famously the “Safer at Home” order–Emergency Order #12. That order closed all “non-essential” businesses in the state.
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