The Appleton Common Council met 01/19/2022. The meeting took less than 30 minutes. The largest portion of the meeting was the Covid-19 Update.
Although it was not as long as the update, another important part of the meeting was the vote by the Common Council to approve Mayor Woodford’s recommendation to hire Charles E. Sepers, Jr., PhD to serve as the City of Appleton’s next Health Officer. The Council approved the recommendation 14-0 with no discussion other than Alderperson Michael Smith (District 10) welcoming Mr. Sepers to Appleton and stating it was a good fit.
His first day will be February 14th.
As noted, the Covid-19 Update was the largest portion of the meeting.
Interim Health Officer Sonja Jensen told the Council that Appleton was seeing the effects of the surge mainly due to the Omicron variant. She reviewed the weekly case counts and burden numbers. The threshold to enter the “Critically High” burden category was 1,000 cases per 100,000 residents, and at 4,742.7 Appleton was nearly 5 times that. They had to adjust the graph that visually showed the weekly burden rates due to the surge.
She also reviewed the city’s current transmission rate and reminded everyone that they could get updates on daily case counts as well as other information on the city’s Covid-19 dashboard.
Although she did not have a corresponding slide, she did note that, per the Covid dashboard at WHA.org, the Fox Valley HERC region had 165 hospitalized covid patients as of 01/19/2022, 27 of whom were in the ICU. [I did grab a screenshot of that.]
She said that vaccinations continued to creep up across the United States. They were not seeing big jumps in numbers for fully vaccinated individuals but they were continuing to see some new people get vaccinated.
The numbers were increasing more rapidly in the 5-11 year-old age group and as of 01/18/2022, 21.3% of individuals in that group were fully vaccinated while 29.0% had received at least one dose. She also noted that “23,532 people have received booster doses and/or additional doses of Covid vaccines in the City of Appleton.”
She said that the vaccination clinic they had been running at the former Best Buy site on Kensington Drive had been very successful and they stopped offering vaccines there at the end of December. “We’re constantly evaluating the needs of the community, and at that time the need of the community was definitely testing. So, we’ve transitioned over to 5 day a week testing.” They’ve partnered with ThedaCare which offers both rapid and PCR testing, and there is also a small National Guard unit still there offering PCR testing.
She included a link to and screenshot of the page on the Wisconsin DHS website that provided vaccination data if people wanted to get more information on rates state-wide, county-wide, or locally.
She said that some people wanted to know the data on breakthrough infections, so she provided some general data on Wisconsin breakthrough rates in December.
[During the December 16, 2021 Common Council meeting, Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim (District 13) had asked if Interim Health Officer Jensen could provide the number of breakthrough cases to-date as well as the percentage of vaccinated people that were hospitalized. This was information that Ms. Jensen had provided several times in the past but then stopped reporting as a matter of course. Interim Health Officer Jensen did not have that information available during the December meeting but said she would get that to Alderperson Hartzheim and make sure that she had it available before the next Council meeting. It does seem to me that the information she provided at this January meeting was not the information that Alderperson Hartzheim had asked for back in December and which she said that she would have available for this meeting. I do also think that presenting some percentages that could be turned into actual numbers instead of vague “rates” would have been beneficial to the public.]
Interim Health Officer Jensen then opened things up for questions.
Alderperson Smith said that he had read some articles suggesting that Wisconsin should see their cases peaking right around this time. He asked if she was seeing indications of it peaking or decreasing.
She answered, “We have yet to see at least in our area any indications of down-trending. We hope we’re peaking.” She said that when they look at states like New York they see they have peaked and are at least plateauing and maybe even on their way down. In this area, however, they had not yet seen a downtrend.
No one else had any questions.
[I understand that we weren’t necessarily seeing a downtrend on 01/19/2022, but I was a little surprised that she didn’t mention anything about the trajectory of new cases slowing. During the Covid-19 Update to the Board of Health the week before, she had talked about how weekly cases had doubled from the week before for several weeks. The fact that that trend had not continued into the last full week seems like something that ought to have been noted as well as the fact that, even as illustrated by one of the slides she shared, the 7-day running average of new confirmed and probable cases had decreased over the last few days.]
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=905562&GUID=2C6A749D-AE0F-465E-8319-BBDC903E2C04
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