FROM THE WISCONSIN DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH SERVICES

Wisconsin Electronic Disease Surveillance System upgrade will cause a brief outage affecting COVID-19 reporting over the weekend

In order to increase COVID-19 mitigation efforts throughout the state, the Wisconsin Electronic Disease Surveillance System (WEDSS) that collects an array of data will undergo system improvements this weekend. The upgrade will improve tools for contact tracing, automate data entry, enhance security features, and strengthen the system to accommodate any increase in cases. During this upgrade, the system will experience an outage and the data used to provide visualizations and other statistics on the DHS COVID-19 webpages will not be updated until after the upgrade is complete.

WEDSS is the system that Wisconsin Local and Tribal Health Departments (LTHDs), health care providers, and other public health partners use to collect and monitor data on testing, contact tracing, and other surveillance metrics. The system provides public health experts with the information they need to assess disease activity and inform decisions.

During the upgrade and routine maintenance, the system will be down. The outage will begin at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 16. During this time, LTHDs and state public health staff will use alternative methods for data collection. Contact tracing may also be impacted, however, DHS is increasing staffing before and after the planned update to account for outage. Reporting of test results will not be impacted.

The updates are scheduled to go live on Monday, October 19 and accurate reporting of the visualizations and data presented on DHS COVID-19 Data Webpages should resume by Tuesday, October 20. For a more accurate representation of disease activity in Wisconsin over the course of this upgrade, residents are encouraged to look at 7-day averages instead of daily positivity rates.