STURGEON BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – In the past month, only 19 Door County residents have tested positive for COVID-19. In the past two weeks, there’s only been three new cases.
“First of all, I’m not sure I even like to talk about it, because we don’t want to jinx it,” said Susan Powers, Door County’s health officer.
“We’ve sort of been avoiding talking about it in our office. We’re thrilled with it. I think it’s maybe a perfect storm of things going right.”
That storm includes the timing of right before Memorial Day weekend, 63.7% of the county receiving at least one dose of a vaccine, and fewer people getting tested.
“We’ve had about 184 negative tests in the last two weeks, so people are getting tested,” said Powers.
Powers tells FOX 11 Door County’s older demographics likely play a role in the area’s high vaccination rates. 92.5% of those 65 and older in the county have received at least one vaccine dose.
The 19 positive tests over the past month accounts for .06% of the county population.
Yet, the Department of Health Services is still classifying Door County in the medium category for COVID-19 activity. FOX 11 wanted to know why, but DHS couldn’t provide us anyone for an interview.
Instead, DHS sent us a two-paragraph statement that points out activity level is a combination of case burden and case trajectory.
“We summarize a county’s confirmed case burden and trajectory into a single composite indicator that we call “Activity Level”,” said Natalee Desotell, a public health data scientist for the state, in the statement. “When burden class is moderately high and there is no significant trajectory, the resulting composite status is “High”. However, when the burden class is moderately high and there is a significant shrinking trajectory, it is placed into the “Medium” category (this is also explained in the ‘about our data’ section). It might not make intuitive sense that trajectory alone (or lack thereof) can have such an impact on the composite indicator. However, the summary/activity level is not meant to reflect case burden alone. It takes trajectory into account because moderately high + shrinking is more desirable than moderately high + potentially plateauing.”
FOX 11 asked Kelly Vannoy, a Sturgeon Bay resident, whether she was worried about cases increasing with tourists starting to flock to the area.
“No. I don’t think so, because I think even the people that are coming from Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois are pretty good about doing it as well.”
Vannoy says she and almost everyone she knows made sure to get vaccinated ahead of tourism season.
“Yeah, come to Door County. Let’s get the restaurants filled and the tourism going again. That would be incredible.”
County health officials say they hope to have vaccination teams at major events throughout the summer, so their numbers can get in an even better place.
