Letters to the Editor

Dear editor, As I visit local businesses in the River Valley area, there are stark differences in how businesses have responded to the recent surge in COVID-19 cases. Some still require face coverings. The rate of mask wearing at my local grocery including employees rarely hits 50 percent anymore and I have only seen shopping carts get sanitized once. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just take a vote and make the pandemic go away? Unfortunately, public health emergencies don’t work that way. My colleagues used to speak of a pre-pandemic world. Now we long for the pre-delta variant days.   We are 22 months into the pandemic and we still aren’t using the language of public health to describe it. News reports talk about percent positives, new cases, and deaths. What we need to know is the new case rate per 100,000 (100K) residents per day. Thank goodness the omicron spike is finally heading downwards. But Sauk County, in the heart of the River Valley, was at 192 new cases per 100K per day as I write. To truly declare victory over the virus, we must be at or below 1 new case per 100K/day.    COVID-19 has killed 154 River Valley residents (based on Iowa, Richland, and Sauk counties) since March, 2020. For comparison, New Zealand has only lost 52. The tri-county body count is 2.76 times as high as for all New Zealand!   While many Wisconsin employers are rightfully requiring employees to be vaccinated or submit to periodic virus testing, GOP lawmakers want to tell them how to run their businesses. State Senator Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) co-sponsored a Senate bill based on Assembly Bill 675 which would require employers to accept evidence of “natural immunity” in lieu of vaccination status or negative tests. The presumption is that if you were ever exposed to SARS-CoV-2 you are good to go. This has not proven to be the case. Numerous reinfections have been reported, some serious. Trusted medical experts believe that natural immunity will need to be supplemented by an omicron-specific booster to avoid hospitalization.  I appreciate the good intentions of AB 675, but it needs to consider real working people. How is someone with no paid time off and earning less than a living wage supposed to be able to afford visits to the doctor and pay for antibody testing? Even if people have insurance, antibody testing isn’t covered by all insurance plans. AB 675 amounts to an unfunded mandate for those who can’t get time off to get medical proof of immunity. I encourage the Senate to add a provision requiring health insurance to cover serology testing. For those low wage front line essential workers, we need to expand Medicaid. If Missouri and 37 other states can do it, so can we.    George Washington required all his troops to be vaccinated against smallpox. Many historians believe that without vaccination, we would have lost the Revolutionary War. Our vaccines are much safer than the relatively primitive but effective process back in the 1770s. State law mandates vaccines for mumps, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis, and polio, to name a few.  To those of you out there who are hesitating to get vaccinated because you had a wicked respiratory virus a while back and think “it must have been COVID” so now you’re immune. Please get medical proof that you have an adequate level of antibodies to keep you from getting a debilitating case of COVID. Or better yet, get vaccinated. It’s what any patriotic American used to do.  Mike Russell Arena