19 Wisconsin Coronavirus Cases Linked To April Election

MILWAUKEE, WI — A little more than two weeks after thousands of voters took to the polls in Wisconsin for the presidential primary and statewide general election, health officials say they've learned 19 people infected with the new coronavirus were involved in election activities.

"We have correlation. They voted, they were at the polls, but we do not have causation," Julie Willems Van Dijk, DHS deputy secretary, said in a FOX 6 report. "They are all people who could have had exposure at other places."

State health officials say they do not know whether the 19 people became infected because they went to a polling place, or whether they were already infected by the time they participated in the election.

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State health officials said those infected either voted in-person or worked at the polls on election day.

"Public health officials continue to interview people who have tested positive with COVID-19 and query whether someone has reported voting in person or working at the polls. Since we only have data on positive cases (without a comparison group of people who were not tested or tested negative), there is no way to know with certainty if any exposures at the polls that are reported are in fact attributable to COVID-19 illness," Wisconsin health officials said in a statement.

Long Lines, Exposure Risk

For municipal clerks across Wisconsin, election day was an exercise in compassion, efficiency and compliance.

As people filed into the few voting centers that were open, volunteers and voters alike risked exposing themselves to the new coronavirus.

National Guard members were deployed in plain clothes across the state, directing people into the correct lines and helping them navigate an unfamiliar voting center as the state shrank the number of polling places due to a critical shortage of poll workers.

Across the state, poll workers donned masks and gloves. Some wore surgical scrubs and protective gowns to the polling place. In many suburban Milwaukee communities, voters were either handed single-use pens or were asked to bring their own.

Voters in Milwaukee stood in lines that wound around city blocks and across city streets. Many maintained a six-foot buffer between others, extending the lines additional feet.

"You've taken this group of people and forced them to make a choice between their health and their vote," Oak Creek City Clerk Catherine Roeske told Patch.

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