COVID-19 Response

The mission of the Winnebago County Health Department (WCHD) is to protect and promote health through services, partnerships, and equitable practices and policies. Our staff upheld this mission and remained dedicated to the health and safety of our community throughout the pandemic.

Many staff were completely removed from their normal duties to ensure the health of Winnebago County was the at the forefront as the virus spread. We learned and adapted to a new ways of doing things, like using Zoom to continue to work together in the safety of our homes. As COVID-19 cases continued to rise, we hired and trained temporary staff to increase our capacity to respond to the the pandemic. Many of the additional staff were focused on conducting disease investigations and contact tracing for the community and schools.

In 2020, we strengthened our community partnerships an developed new ones as we all worked together to prevent the spread of COVID-19. We worked with the Wisconsin National Guard, Wisconsin Department of Health Services, local health departments, other departments within our county and numerous volunteers to stand up a regional testing site. We also worked with UW-Oshkosh and local healthcare providers to provide rapid antigen tests to the community. We worked very closely every day with our schools, local organizations and businesses to respond the pandemic and mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

We focused on communications throughout the pandemic and launched various initiatives to keep the community informed and up-to-date. Situation Updates were sent daily to the public, partners, healthcare providers and elected officials informing them of our local response, updates from the CDC and DHS, and community resources. We launched the COVID-19 Hotline to answer questions and provide another resource for the public to get up-to-date information. We worked with our county GIS department to develop a COVID Data Dashboard to share daily data, such as case counts by municipality, deaths and recovered cases. In mid-summer, WCHD started sharing weekly data summaries with our community that provided details on case counts broken down by age, municipality, and school district geographic boundary, as well as information on percent positivity, testing numbers, deaths, and hospitalizations.