Plague

COVID-19 infection rates have been increasing throughout the summer. One epidemiologist is advocating for getting booster shots now to target recent variants in hopes of avoiding another spike as Wisconsin edges into respiratory virus season. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently recommended people ages 6 months and older get an updated COVID-19 booster.…

In November 2020, Danielle Sigler tested approximately 200 residents in a Mount Horeb, Wis., nursing home during a COVID-19 outbreak. The residents weren’t the only ones Sigler was worried about; 25 of her staff at Ingleside Communities also got infected. And in the process of testing vulnerable residents, the 36-year-old nursing home administrator herself caught…

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on April 1, 2020 and has since been updated, with the most recent changes made on Aug. 6, 2022. Data visualizations are updated on a recurring basis. Following its emergence, the COVID-19 pandemic struck Wisconsin in a series of waves with varying degrees of intensity that has peaked…

Normally at this time of year, staff at Heartland Farm Sanctuary in Verona would be gearing up for the wave of visitors coming to pet, cuddle and admire their adorable menagerie of farm animals. “Lots of sheep snuggles and goat scratches,” said Jamie Monroe, the sanctuary’s communications director. Instead, public and private tours are on…

Tens of thousands of people across the eastern part of Wisconsin remain without power Thursday afternoon as We Energies undertakes what its president calls “the largest restoration in our company’s history.” Tuesday’s storms left almost 127,000 customers without power. According to the We Energies Outage Tracker, 48,900 customers were still without power as of 3:30…

Situated along the eastern banks of the St. Croix River just 18 miles from downtown St. Paul, the community of Hudson, Wisconsin, serves as a primary gateway to the Badger State for Minnesotans from the Twin Cities metro area. As such, in 2020 Hudson emerged as a magnet for would-be revelers seeking to avoid Minnesota’s…

Time has taken on elastic qualities over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic— slowing, stretching and slipping as uncertainty has reigned — but its passage has been accompanied by one abiding hope: finding a remedy. Medical researchers around the world have spent their time on parallel yet overlapping quests to take on the disease —…

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services issues data on a daily basis that list the number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases reported to the state by local health departments, as well as numbers of deaths and coronavirus tests conducted. Over time, these daily updates can reflect how the pandemic’s intensity and geography is shifting in…

When the coronavirus started spreading around Wisconsin in the spring of 2020, Dr. Chad Tamez hosted Facebook Live sessions to help patients understand what was initially a mysterious new pathogen. A family physician who co-owns a private practice in West Bend, Tamez seized on the power of social media to discuss new medical findings about…

Alarmed by “near-exponential” growth in COVID-19 cases across Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers on Sept. 22 declared his third public health emergency during the pandemic and extended a statewide mask mandate to Nov. 21. The governor blamed a September spike in cases on young people eschewing distancing practices as universities started a new semester with in-person…