March 17, 2020 8:35p; Updated Mar. 18 9a with references to Salem Grade School
(WGTD)----Three of the four Kenosha County residents who tested positive for the coronavirus are members of the same family who'd been traveling and had contact with a person who also tested positive, according to the director of the Kenosha County Health Department, Jen Freiheit. One of the three is apparently a student at Salem Grade School, according to a letter posted on the school's website from the district administrator.
Freiheit briefed the Kenosha County Board in a virtual meeting Tuesday night. Freiheit did not mention the student or the student's school, but used a school setting in responding to a question of how health department staffers go about investigating who's had contacted with an infected individual.
As worrisome as those three cases might be, the fourth person who tested positive, a 59-year-old woman, has no travel history and no known connection with someone who tested positive. The circumstances surrounding that illness have led the experts to categorize the case as one of "community spread."
That's fear of the new virus spreading uncontrollably is the reason officials have moved aggressively to close schools, limit the size of gatherings and order closed in-door dining facilities.
Freiheit offered no prediction on when things might get better, other than to say she wouldn't be surprised if the concern would last weeks longer than originally discussed. Gov. Evers Tuesday indefinitely suspended K-12 classes after originally indicating that the closure, announced last Friday, would end in the first week of April.
Freiheit also discussed a new state policy on who's eligible to be tested for COVID-19. The new guidelines reserve testing for critically ill patients and seriously ill nursing home residents whose symptoms are unexplainable. The notion that anyone can be tested--even if they're showing mild symptoms--is wrong. "There are just not enough tests for people who are showing no symtoms or showing mild symptoms," she said.
Exacerbating the problem is a backlog in labs that are equipped to do such procedures. For example, the State Lab of Hygiene received 1,000 samples alone on Monday, but has a daily testing capacity of 400.
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