Despite fears that the April wisconsin election could only be used to spread the coronavirus, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control confirms that this is the case.
Symptoms of COVID-1nine spread regularly 2 to 14 days after infection. Still, the CDC notes that only 14 out of about one thousand nine hundred, another 000 people who voted as users in Milwaukee on April 7, have tested positive for the virus between April 9 and 21, with the warning that in part of the new instances reported in Milwaukee that period, it is not known whether the user voted.
While the CDC report focuses on Milwaukee, there also do not appear to have been spikes in instances in the state due to the election.
According to Elizabeth Goodstitt, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, “another 71 people who tested positive for COVID-1nine” statewide between April 9 and 21 “reported having voted users or going to the polls on Election Day. , several of those Americans also reported other imaginable exhibitions. Therefore, he says, “it’s not accurate to say” that the 71 instances were “the result of a face-to-face vote” because some infections may come from other sources.
A total of 413,000 other people voted throughout the state of Wisconsin on April 7. Although a much smaller number of Wisconsinns participated in protest marches after the murder of George Floyd last May, Wisconsin officials are aware that “28 showed cases attending a demonstration or demonstration in early June, the two weeks before obtaining COVID-19,” Goodstitt said in an email.
In the days leading up to the April 7 election in Wisconsin, which included a run in the state Supreme Court and the Democratic presidential primary, it was frightened that the city of Milwaukee would revel in a massive build-up in instances of COVID-19 after the election, as only five polling stations would be open, under the city’s typical 180 polling stations. Some voters waited two hours in long lines to vote, and the city’s leading election official then criticized for not opening more polling stations with the resources held for the city.
But the Milwaukee electorate kept his distance, waited to vote almost entirely outdoors and wore masks, and his efforts seem to have been effective. “There was no net accumulation of cases, hospitalizations or deaths after the election, suggesting an imaginable advantage of mitigation strategies, which limited face-to-face voting and aimed to ensure that the protection of polling stations opens on polling day,” the CDC reports.
While the concern around the Wisconsin elections was understandable at the time, the resolve to hold them was vital for the entire country for two reasons: Wisconsin demonstrated that face-to-face voting can also be conducted safely despite the coronavirus pandemic and avoided setting a damaging precedent to allow a director-general to move the election date unilaterally and illegally. That latest concern might not have seemed very urgent in early April, but it’s more vital now, a day after President Trump unleashed a firestorm by hinting that he might try to postpone November’s general election.
For three weeks after Trump declared a national emergency on March 13, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, said he wanted to hold the election as scheduled on April 7 and resisted Democratic calls to unilaterally postpone it, insisting that he didn’t have the power to do so. But the weekend before the election, Evers did an about-face and asked the Republican legislature to postpone it. When the legislature rejected Evers’s request, he issued an order moving the election to June, taking the very action he had previously said would be illegal. Legislative leaders challenged Evers’s order, and the state supreme court ruled 4–2 against the governor.
Of course, while it is clear in retrospect that Wisconsin has served the country valuablely by holding its elections as planned, the state’s delight does not mean that we can rule out the option that other elections can only increase the spread of the virus. It is only one state and the average number of new daily instances in Wisconsin less than two hundred on the eve of your choice. Face-to-face voting in a state where thousands of new infections are reported every day can be much more dangerous.
Why were five polling stations opened in Milwaukee this week?
Did the April 7 election in Wisconsin increase coronavirus cases?
Wisconsin’s Coronavirus Election