The Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) disclosed today that seventy-two individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 said they had recently attended a “large gathering.” But there is no way of knowing how many of these cases trace back to a massive anti-quarantine rally at the state capitol on April 24.
Bill Lueders
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That’s because DHS is not asking people who contracted the disease in the last two weeks since the rally whether they attended the protest, at which social distancing recommendations were openly flouted and most attendees did not wear masks.
“Possible exposures during protests haven’t been specifically added to the database because we already ask about large gatherings,” wrote DHS spokesperson Jennifer Miller, in an email to The Progressive. “We were able to pull some limited data—out of 1,986 cases with onset/diagnosis on or after 4/26, there were seventy-two cases who reported attending a large gathering.”
She offered an important caveat: “No, it doesn’t specifically state that the seventy-two were at a rally, but this is the data we have.”
In an email earlier this week, Miller explained that the people doing contact tracing in Wisconsin were not asking people who tested positive whether they attended the April 24 protest.
She wrote: “Contact tracers do ask if patients attended mass gatherings, but not specifically about protests, so there’s really no data on who may have contracted COVID-19 at a protest.”
In a follow-up email today, Miller mentioned that DHS had made some attempts to answer this question from available information.
The April 7 election drew more than 400,000 people to the polls. With today’s news that seventy-two people who contracted COVID-19 said they recently attended a large gathering, that means it’s possible that more people were infected while attending the protest rally than while voting.
“The team did a cursory word search in their large gathering information and notes, as well as the main notes in WEDSS [Wisconsin Electronic Disease Surveillance System], and there were no mentions of protests, protesting, or capitol,” she wrote. “They just responded to the question of having attended large gatherings.”
Wouldn’t it have been better for DHS to have asked such a question directly, rather than trying afterward to divine an answer through word searches?
And what does it say about the state of Wisconsin’s contact-tracing performance if it isn’t identifying specific places where people may have contracted the virus? How can this not be considered relevant information?
At an online media briefing today, Scott Bauer of the Associated Press asked this question:
Bill Lueders
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“After the April 7 election, you asked people who tested positive whether they had been at the polls,” Bauer asked. “Why was that a good idea to ask about but not ask if people had been at the April 24 rally at the Capitol, where 1,500 gathered?”
Andrea Palm, the DHS’s secretary designee, replied: “The work of contact tracing gets at all of those things. It asks about where you’ve been, who you've been in contact with, the locations you’ve visited outside of your home. And so whether you went to the polls as a poll worker or as a voter, whether you came to the protest, or went to another large gathering.”
So why was it a good idea to ask about whether people who test COVID-19 if they voted in person but not if they had been at the protest on April 24?
Palm did not address that part of Bauer’s question, even though it was the only part.
DHS has just updated its tally of the number of cases in which people who went to the polls on April 7 tested positive. It now says there have been sixty-seven such cases, though these infections could have come from other exposures.
The April 7 election drew more than 400,000 people to the polls. With today’s news that seventy-two people who contracted COVID-19 said they recently attended a large gathering, that means it’s possible that more people were infected while attending the protest rally than while voting.
It looks like we’ll never know.