Crisis mode: Everything is on pause while Madison confronts the coronavirus

Our community is preparing for a wave of infections the magnitude of which is still unknown. City, county and state government officials have taken unprecedented action to stave off the spread of the coronavirus, the ultimate wrath of which we are only beginning to understand. The immediate concern is to ease the inevitable spread of the virus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, so the healthcare system doesn’t become overwhelmed.

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Dane County Executive Joe Parisi and Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway say current efforts focus on impacting the trajectory of the coronavirus. There were three confirmed cases of coronavirus in Dane County on March 11. A week later, there were 23. There are 106 cases confirmed statewide as of March 18. The number of cases is expected to rise, especially when testing becomes more widely available.

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Local and state health officials announced March 17 that new cases of coronavirus in Dane County and other Wisconsin counties “indicate community spread,” meaning there is “no known source of the disease, such as recent contact with an infected person or travel from an area with a high number of cases.”

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Rhodes-Conway says the city will maintain core services “as long as possible.”

“That includes the transportation system, of course public safety, also things like trash pickup,” she says. “We also need to make sure that at least some of our functions come back before too long, so that we keep the city going.”

When will things feel normal again?

Rhodes-Conway says a return to reality could be a year away, maybe more.

“I think we’ll come back to something that looks a lot more like normal sooner than that,” says the mayor. “But if you’re talking about how long before we have a vaccine, a possible treatment, how long before the mental health impacts will pass? It’s a long time.”

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