The Common Council met 11/17/2021. As per usual, they received a Covid-19 Update from Interim Health Officer Sonja Jensen.
Health Officer Jensen reported that the city had a total of 350 cases the previous week which an increase of over 90 from the 257 the week before. The Appleton’s 2- week case count was 607 which resulted in a disease burden of 809.3 per 100,000 residents. That remained in the “Very High” category for burden.
She noted that the last time Appleton was at a comparable level of cases was the week of January 11, 2021.
She then reported on hospitalizations in the Fox Valley Healthcare Emergency Readiness Coalition (HERC) region. As of the afternoon of 11/17/2021, across the 13 hospitals in the Fox Cities HERC region there were 90 Covid-19 patients, 15 of whom were in the ICU. Over the past 2 weeks, hospitalizations and ICU stays have increased, and she said, “I think a couple of weeks before that they were leveling off or decreasing, but now they have been on their way back up.”
She apologized for not having a vaccination report to present to the Council and explained that, “There is some data at the state level that they’ve been working on, so it wasn’t quite up to date for the comparables.” But she would have that information available at the next meeting, at which point she also hoped to have information on vaccinations in the 5-11 year-old age group, as vaccines had recently been approved for children that young.
She said that the city was continuing to hold vaccination clinics every Thursday and Friday at their site in the former Best Buy building on Kensington Drive. On 11/18 and 11/19 they were doing a special clinic for kids aged 5-11. Those were by appointment only and had proved to be popular; she thought that the appointments had almost all been filled already. After those clinics were held, anybody with children age 5-11 could come to any of the city-run clinics on Thursday or Friday. Available at those clinics are all three Covid-19 vaccines for 1st and 2nd doses as well as boosters. Everyone age 5 and up can get vaccinated there. The city also offers testing on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays at that same location.
She then opened things up for questions.
In response to Interim Health Officer Jensen’s statement that the last time Appleton had been at this case level was on January 11 of this year, Alderperson Kristin Alfheim (District 11) wanted to know if she had comparative information regarding hospitalizations and what hospitalizations were like on January 11. Could she see if cases were more or less severe back at that time.
Interim Health Officer Jensen did not have that information, but she said she could get that information and provide that to Alderperson Alfheim later.
[I can say that, back on January 11, there were 76 people in the Fox Valley HERC region who were hospitalized with Covid-19, 7 of whom were in the ICU. I don’t really understand why Health Officer Jensen was comparing the current rates to January’s numbers to begin with. Back in January Appleton was on the back side of the winter spike in cases and numbers were going down. Right now, we still seem to be very much in the middle of our fall/winter increase in cases. It seems like it would have made more sense to compare the cases on November 16 2021 with the cases on November 16 of 2020 rather than to cases in January. At any rate on November 16 of last year, there were 135 people hospitalized with Covid in the Fox Valley HERC region, 14 of whom were in the ICU.]
Alderperson Michael Smith (District 10) asked of hospitalized patients, what was the breakdown between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
Interim Health Officer Jensen said she did not have that data in front of her. She said that there is data at the state level that comes out on the 15th of every month that does break down cases, hospitalizations, and deaths between vaccinated and unvaccinated. She said that she could share that information with him after the meeting.
Alderperson Smith said he thought that maybe there were other people on the Council who had similar questions. [My impression was that he was somewhat offput by her offer to talk to him privately and would have preferred a public answer.] He asked her if that data on the state website told how many people in the hospital were vaccinated vs unvaccinated.
[As far as I can tell, the WI DHS website does not actually state how many hospitalized people are vaccinated vs unvaccinated. Rather, it gives the rate of hospitalizations among vaccinated people vs not fully vaccinated people, which was not the information Alderperson Smith seemed to be asking for. The DHS website also does not differentiate between partially vaccinated and completely unvaccinated people, instead lumping those groups together into one “not fully vaccinated” group, which, again, wouldn’t speak to Alderperson Smith’s question since he wanted to know about vaccinated vs. unvaccinated.
I am a little surprised that Interim Health Officer Jensen wasn’t able to, at a minimum, give the percentage of fully vaccinated people who were hospitalized since she has provided that information as a routine part of her update during past meetings.]
She answered that it did but said it was state-wide data [as opposed to local data].
Mayor Woodford noted that the city linked to the DHS webpage on its Covid dashboard.
Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) asked, in light of the rise in cases and the anticipated additional increase due to the holidays, “are there any discussions—staff, city-wide—about any policy changes if we hit the critically high mark during the holidays?”
Mayor Woodford responded, “I’ll just say from the city perspective, we continue to monitor the situation. We’re also paying attention to the guidance that’s coming from the state Department of Health Services and also the CDC. So, we’ll continue to monitor. At this point, there aren’t any imminent operational changes planned at the city when we hit another mark. We continue to monitor our operational progress with regular check-ins between the Human Resources Department and the Health Department to make sure we’re paying attention to employee cases within our organization to ensure continuity of operations. If we get to a point where we have concerns about continuity of operations or the health and safety of our employees, we’ll certainly make adjustments to our approach as we have in the past, but at this time no imminent changes based on hitting another level. At this point the only sort of indexed changes to city policy are related to the use of face coverings which, as we’ve said before, is connected to the rate of transmission in the community. When we get below substantial transmission the masks will go away in city facilities but we’re a long way from that based on the data that is being reported.”
Alderperson Schultz asked “Do we have a percentage of city staff and employees that are immunized vs non? Is that something you can share?”
Mayor Woodford answered, “That’s not data that we collected.”
There were no further questions, and Mayor Woodford reminded the alderperson that if they had any other questions, they could contact either himself or Health Officer Jensen.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=901917&GUID=B42EA738-EF61-405C-86AB-9EBF6DC315A9
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