I thought it would be useful to go back through Covid case counts and hospitalization rates and get an idea of what the weekly community levels would have been under the CDC’s current measures. I think this is particularly important for people who will be attending school in the fall given that for the last two years Covid mitigation efforts have disproportionately affected students as compared to the general population.
If the last two years of Covid cases and hospitalizations are any indication of how things will look this fall, Appleton can expect to be in the “High” Covid-19 community level for the majority of the first semester of the 2022-23 school year.
The CDC’s guidelines for individuals in communities with a “High” Covid Level include this such as:
- Wearing a well-fitting mask indoors in public, regardless of vaccination status (including in K-12 schools and other indoor community settings)
- Staying up to date with COVID-19 vaccines and boosters
- Follow the CDC’s recommendations for isolation and quarantine, including getting tested if you are exposed to COVID-19 or have symptoms of COVID-19
Here’s some background on how I calculated the historical Covid-19 community levels.
Health Officer Charles Sepers has told the Board of Health that Appleton’s community level will be determined by the highest community level of any of the three counties the city straddles. I focused on Outagamie County because a majority of the city lies in that county.
The CDC has fairly straightforward metrics to calculate a county’s Covid-19 level. If a county’s number of cases in a week exceeds 200 per 100,000 residents, the county will automatically enter the “Medium” category. If, on top of those 200 cases, hospitalized Covid-19 patients takes up 10% or more of available hospital beds, then the county enters the “High” category.
Historical data on both county case counts and hospitalizations is readily available. The county data can be found on the Wisconsin DHS website. The historical hospitalization data can be found on the federal Health and Human Resources page or this website run by Gannett Media which pulls from the HHS database and is, frankly, much easier to read and more user friendly.
Health Officer Sepers told me that “some counties have been lumped together for calculating county-level hospital data,” and that “Outagamie County is a combination of Waupaca and Outagamie Counties to calculate the Outagamie County hospitalization capacity/COVID-19 hospitalizations.”
There are 4 hospitals in Outagamie and Waupaca counties.
- Ascension St Elizabeth Campus Appleton
- ThedaCare Regional Medical Center Appleton
- ThedaCare Medical Center New London
- ThedaCare Medica Center Waupaca
I went back through the weekly numbers in those data sets and calculated what the percentage was of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 as compared to the number of hospital beds available.
I then calculated the weekly number of cases in Outagamie County and, using a population figure of 19,1545, adjusted those case counts per 100,000 residents.
The one problem is that the hospitalization data seems to come out on Fridays whereas weekly case counts are made Sunday through Saturday. I put the hospitalization numbers with the week that that was closest. I don’t think that impacts the overall numbers that much. Essentially for the last two years, Covid patients have accounted for 10% or more of hospitalizations from August/September through January/February and case counts have been sufficiently high to keep Outagamie County in the “Red” category for most of that timeframe.
The Appleton Area School District has been unclear as to how they intend to handle Covid-19 during the 2022-23 school year, and outgoing Superintendent Judy Baseman’s suggestion that she anticipated treating it like influenza was not backed up by Appleton Health Officer Charles Sepers.
Parents who have concerns may want to consider other schooling options. The School Choice/Private School Voucher signup window is still currently open. The deadline to get applications in for that is April 15. The window to most easily open enroll into a different public school system is also currently open, and the deadline for those applications is April 29.
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