MADISON, WI (WTAQ) — It’s been around three weeks since the Thanksgiving Holiday, and we haven’t seen the dramatic spike in COVID-19 infections that politicians and state health experts predicted we’d see in the days leading up to the holiday.
When asked about it on Thursday, DHS secretary designee Andrea Palm says it’s because people listened to the warnings.
“We worked really hard to message and talk to people about making safe choices for their holiday celebrations,” Palm said. “While we certainly didn’t want to say them and people didn’t want to hear them they were important to our work together to try to reduce the strain.”
However, Triple AAA estimates that 50 million Americans, including over a million Wisconsinites, still traveled during the holiday season, and airports also saw increased volume as people few around the country to visit and gather with family despite the insistence from health experts that they don’t.
Even without the spike, Palm says the numbers in Wisconsin are still at a critical level.
“Our daily numbers are still too high,” Palm said. “We still have staffing shortages at hospitals…we still have hospitals that are strained.”
DHS reported 3,643 new confirmed cases Thursday, or 33.3% of the 10,938 total tests done. The state also reported 59 new deaths. The seven day average fell to 3,191 cases, 27.8% test positivity and 44 deaths.
Since the pandemic began, there have been 448,441 total cases, nearly 2.3 million negative tests and 4,255 deaths. DHS listed 403,706 recoveries as of Thursday.
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