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| Winnebago County Health Department |
County and state authorities are reporting the track of the coronavirus on a daily basis, but one key statistic has been missing: the number of recovered patients.
“At this time we do not have a reliable, accurate source of data to report this information,” said Doug Gieryn, director of the Winnebago County Health Department.
One problem is that many people who get the disease “have minimal or no symptoms, so they never contact a health care provider or local health department, so there is no record of them ever having the virus,” he said.
“Our efforts are currently focused on tracking the contacts to cases to help prevent spread of disease the best we can,” Gieryn added. “Most cases will recover, and it is likely that our earliest reported cases have already.”
Gieryn also responded to another question that many in the community have been asking--where exactly are the people who have tested positive?
“At this point, we are not yet reporting the residential locations of confirmed COVID-19 cases,” he said, noting that this may change.
“It’s very likely we will release geographic data as we have more cases and additional community spread,” he said. “At this time, the geographic location of cases does not appropriately reflect where transmission occurred nor is it predictive of where future transmission may occur.”
Officials initially said that federal privacy laws prevented them from releasing location information, but that is apparently not the case. States, including Illinois, have started releasing patient data by ZIP code.
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The number of positive test results in Winnebago County remains at 23, the Health Department said Wednesday.
Separately the Wisconsin Department of Health Services reported a statewide increase of 178 cases to a total of 2,756. A total of 99 Wisconsin residents have died from COVID-19 as of Wednesday afternoon, DHS said, an increase of seven from the day before.
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