SHAWANO COUNTY (NBC 26) — As some Northeast Wisconsin areas see rising community transmission rates, medical experts say vaccinations, education and masking continue to be the best mitigation strategies to end the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CDC lists Calumet and Shawano Counties as the second-highest level for community transmission of COVID-19 labeled as "substantial." To be put in this category, a county needs to have 50 to 99 new cases per 100,000 people in the past seven days.
Terri Harmala, health officer with the Shawano-Menominee Counties Health Department, said they had an outbreak of less than 50 COVID-19 cases at a congregate living facility the second week of July that shot the county's numbers up. On Thursday, Harmala said there are 28 positive COVID-19 cases in the rest of the community.
"This is why we're not done yet," Harmala said. "We're doing the best we can, but as a society we know it can turn on a dime."
Harmala said the facility is using mitigation strategies to contain the recent outbreak.
According to the CDC there are 548 U.S. counties at the "substantial" level.
“The only way out of this is vaccination," said Dr. Ashok Rai, president & CEO of Prevea Health. "So once again, this is really a product of unvaccinated individuals."
The latest data from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services reports about 38 percent of qualified Shawano County residents have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Around 36 percent in the same group completed the series.
In Calumet County nearly 47 percent of eligible residents have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and close to 45 percent completed the series.
"The higher vaccination rates you get, the less likely your counties will get into those high, sustained rates of spread. You might see small peaks, but they won’t be sustained," Rai said. “If you have low vaccination rates, you’re going to be in this high, worrisome area, which means more people are going to get COVID, more people are going to get long-term symptoms, more people are going to possibly die or have a really rough life going forward.”
Dr. Raul Mendoza, a pulmonologist at Aurora BayCare Medical Center, recently experienced the worst outcome of the virus.
"My uncle died last week from COVID-19," Mendoza said. "So I can tell from personal experience that a lot of people can be harmed."
He said getting more people vaccinated is key to ending the pandemic and protecting those around us.
"Every person that has died from the disease in this hospital has been an unvaccinated person. Every single one," Mendoza said. "I know that we're tired. We're fatigued of this. But the more we do to prevent the virus from harming others, the faster this will go away."
Mendoza and Rai said a good amount of increasing COVID-19 rates in Wisconsin and across the country has to do with the delta variant, which Rai said is one thousand times more infectious than the strain we experienced last year.
Apart from vaccination, they said the only other mitigation is masking.
The CDC updated its mask guidance to recommend even fully vaccinated people wear face coverings indoors in places of high or substantial transmission. That would include Calumet and Shawano Counties.
“I understand the aggravation," Rai said. “What we don’t want is this virus to keep replicating, and come up with another variant that evades the vaccines we have, and take us all the way back to January and February of ’20. Nobody wants that. So to prevent that we have to get control over this variant. To do that we have to use everything we have at our disposal, including masking and vaccination.”
As of Wednesday, nearly 52 percent of Wisconsin residents have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and about 49 percent have completed the series.
Harmala said the health department is teaming up with ThedaCare to provide pop up vaccine clinics at Shawano's concert in the park series called "Thursdayz @ Franklin." Starting August 5, people can receive the Pfizer shot and be entered in a drawing to win chamber bucks. People who've already received the vaccine can also be entered if they show proof of vaccination. Kids ages 12 through 17 will automatically get $25 in chamber bucks if they're vaccinated.
