No COVID-19 Data Release This Weekend

There will not be COVID-19 case data released this weekend by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

The state’s electronic records system is scheduled to be down for an upgrade. The update is scheduled to be fully implemented by Monday, October 19th, with data released at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, October 20th.

“In order to increase COVID-19 mitigation efforts throughout the state, the Wisconsin Electronic Disease Surveillance System (WEDSS) that collects an array of data will undergo system improvements this weekend,” said DHS in a press release. “The upgrade will improve tools for contact tracing, automate data entry, enhance security features, and strengthen the system to accommodate any increase in cases. During this upgrade, the system will experience an outage and the data used to provide visualizations and other statistics on the DHS COVID-19 webpages will not be updated until after the upgrade is complete.”

DHS said the scheduled outage will impact health departments. “During this time, [local health departments] and state public health staff will use alternative methods for data collection. Contact tracing may also be impacted, however, DHS is increasing staffing before and after the planned update to account for [the] outage. Reporting of test results will not be impacted,” said the department.

If reporting doesn’t resume until Tuesday a one-day surge in reported totals is expected. DHS encourages people to look at seven-day averages to mitigate the one-day report.

On Friday DHS reported a record number of new cases, active hospitalizations, rolling positive case rate and rolling daily death total.

The Wisconsin Hospital Association reported Saturday at 3:30 p.m. that the number of people actively hospitalized fell to 1,083, a drop of 18 from Friday’s record high.