Michael Makowski
A man stands at the center of a crowd at the Wisconsin capitol in a protest against the state's Safer at Home order, now rescinded.
Wisconsin’s public health agency, which failed to ask people who say they attended a “large gathering” before contracting COVID-19 whether it was a protest at the state capitol on April 24, has yet to tally subsequently reported cases.
Last Friday, May 8, state Department of Health Services spokesperson Jennifer Miller said in an email to The Progressive that seventy-two of the roughly 2,000 people who contracted the virus and began showing symptoms since told contact tracers that they had attended a large gathering.
Some people who attended the April 24 rally and subsequently contracted COVID-19 may be reluctant to reveal that they publicly spurned safety guidelines that could have kept them from getting sick.
That number has not been updated since, Miller says, even though people who contracted COVID-19 on April 24 might have started experiencing symptoms as late as May 8, and not reported them until a later date.
“I’m working on it. I don’t have an updated ETA,” Miller wrote on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 13, after expressing optimism that updated numbers would be available by that morning. On Thursday, May 14, she wrote: “The number for mass gatherings stands at 72. We have asked the team to run the data again to see if there has been a change.”
In the meantime, she said, no one at DHS knows what the latest numbers are. Miller said the agency has been “extremely busy addressing a pandemic. When I have an update, you will be the first to know.”
Michael Makowski
The “Trump Unity Bridge,” a decorative float that was also present in Michigan's “Operation Gridlock,” joined the procession of cars circling the Capitol.
Miller earlier stated that health officials had no idea how many of those who attended a large gathering were at the April 24 rally, at which social distancing guidelines were openly flouted, and where most of those in attendance did not wear masks. That’s because state contact tracers were not even asking them about it.
“Contact tracers do ask if patients attended large gatherings but not specifically about protests, so there’s really no data on who may have contracted COVID-19 at a protest,” Miller wrote in an email.
It is not known how many other large gatherings occurred in Wisconsin during this time.
The state’s failure to ask patients specifically about this protest means there is no available data on how many new cases of COVID-19 could have been contracted at an event that was denied a permit on public health grounds. Protests against state-ordered restraints, egged on by President Donald Trump, have been taking place across the country.
You’d think health officials would want to be able to confirm that engaging in such reckless behavior led to negative consequences for some attendees, if indeed that’s the case. This is especially true now that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has struck down Governor Tony Evers’s Safer at Home order, opening the door to more mass gatherings and a deeper disregard for science and health recommendations.
Instead, some people have apparently concluded that there is no actual danger in completely ignoring social distancing and other health guidelines. Some Wisconsin bars were packed with customers sitting elbow-to-elbow as soon as the order was lifted.
Keeping track of those at the rally who later became sick is such a self-evidently good idea that DHS Secretary-designee Andrea Palm publicly suggested that it was occurring. Asked about the matter during an online press briefing on May 8, Palm said the state’s contact tracers were asking people who tested positive for COVID-19 “whether you came to the protest or went to another large gathering.”
This contradicted what spokesperson Miller has said about the question not being asked.
At a media briefing on May 12, DHS Deputy Secretary Julie Willems Van Dijk was asked by The Progressive about this discrepancy. She replied: “[I]t is a standard part of contact tracing to ask about attending mass gatherings, and if the person has been at any event with many people. We ask the question that way, in a generic form, because we want to capture a wide variety of opportunities where people might come together, because that is the risk factor—many people in a smaller space or in close proximity to each other.”
While contact tracers “do not ask about specific events,” Van Dijk said, some patients “may give more specific information.”
Miller has said the department attempted to use contact-tracing information to identify people who said they were at the protest, but to no avail.
“The team did a cursory word search [of case records] and there were no mentions of protests, protesting, or capitol,” she wrote. “They just responded to the question of having attended large gatherings.”
It seems likely that some of those who attended the April 24 rally and subsequently contracted COVID-19 may be reluctant to reveal that they publicly spurned safety guidelines that could have kept them from getting sick.
In contrast to its ask-no-evil approach to the April 24 protest, DHS contact tracers specifically quizzed all people who tested positive within a given time frame whether they voted in person or served as poll workers in an April 7 election that Governor Evers had tried unsuccessfully to delay.
Michael Makowski
A young child holding an American flag observes three protesters carrying assault rifles and wearing camouflage.
In all, Miller says, seventy-one people whose symptoms began between April 9 and April 21 reported that they had either voted in person or worked the polls on Election Day. This tally does not include people whose symptoms began after April 21, “as this would likely not have been the exposure.” Miller adds that the question is now “closed” in the system, meaning that seventy-one will be the final number.
Patients who came down with COVID-19 after they voted or attended a large gathering could have gotten infected from other exposures.
Given the available numbers, it remains possible that the April 24 rally, which drew an estimated 1,500 people, may actually have led to more new cases than the April 7 election, in which more than 400,000 people went to hundreds of polling places across the state.
The Progressive’s reporting on this issue was credited by The Independent, a newspaper based in London, in a story published on May 12. The paper noted that the state could not say how many of the protesters who attended the April 24 rally subsequently tested positive for COVID-19 because “the health department is not tracking attendance of specific events.”
As of May 15, Wisconsin had recorded 11,685 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 445 deaths [updated one hour after initial publication]. Its number of newly reported cases rose sharply for the third straight day, after two days of being below 200. The largest sustained number of new cases was reported between April 30 and May 9, when the total topped 300 on all but one day.