Rock County’s public health nurses are noticing the impact social distancing is having on the local effort to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Anne Weirich is one of the county health department’s nurses conducting contact tracing: getting ahold of every person any COVID-19 patient reported contact with before testing positive.
Before Governor Tony Evers’ safer-at-home order, Weirich said it was nearly impossible to track down all of the potential exposures a patient had.
What’s made the novel coronavirus difficult to slow down is how little the medical community knows about it, compared to other infectious diseases Weirich has dealt with before, and health officials are learning as they go along.
Testing in Rock County and elsewhere has also been limited, making it hard to measure the full extent of the outbreak.
Health officials estimate for every positive COVID-19 case, the county likely has 10 others that haven’t been tested.
Weirich said we may now be just starting to see the impact of in-person voting on April 7 reflected in the coronavirus statistics.
Over the weekend, Rock County reported 11 new positive COVID-19 after having just 10 new cases all of last week.
