Milwaukee officials are concerned about a decline in the number of people getting tested for COVID-19, warning that they could be missing cases of the illness.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett told reporters they’ve seen a “dramatic drop” in the number of people who are getting tested at the city’s community testing sites at Custer Stadium and United Migrant Opportunity Services.
Dr. Ben Weston, director of medical services at the Office of Emergency Management, said the decline has mostly happened over the last two weeks.
“At the same time, we’re not seeing a downtrend in the percent of those tests that are resulting in positive for COVID-19,” Weston said. “This combination of two factors suggests that we’re under testing in Milwaukee County and missing a substantial number of cases of COVID-19 in our community.”
Weston attributed that to “diminished awareness” of the presence and severity of COVID-19.
“As we see stores, restaurants and workplaces opening back up, there’s a sense that we’re done with COVID-19,” he said. “On top of that, we’ve naturally seen our media and our public attention shift the protests and the very real racial inequities in our country.”
That’s leading people to think less about COVID-19 and fewer people feeling they need to get tested, he said.
Testing is critical to controlling the spread of the disease and stopping a potential spike in cases that could strain the healthcare system and bring back additional social distancing measures, Weston said. There’s enough capacity to test more, he said.
The decline in testing is also happening at local healthcare providers, Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik said.
“We are at a boiling point in our country right now and there has been a shift in focus as far as advocating for reforms in law enforcement and just government in general related to anti-black racism in our city and in our country, but we also need to acknowledge that COVID-19 is still here and it still causes injury, disability and death,” she said.
The Wisconsin National Guard, which runs the two sites in Milwaukee, is also doing community-based testing in Madison at the Alliant Energy Center and at Western Technical College in La Crosse.
The guard also collected specimens at Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs facilities in Chippewa Falls and Union Grove on Tuesday.
Teams on Tuesday were also collecting specimens at Green Bay Correctional Institute, Fox Lake Correctional Institute, the Racine Youth Offender Correctional Facility and Oshkosh Correctional Institution.
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