MADISON – Today, Governor Evers and DHS-designee Secretary Andrea Palm made the difficult but necessary decision to extend the Safer at Home order until May 26th. Public health experts and leading health care providers agree that the most effective thing we can do as a state to keep Wisconsinites healthy and safe is to stay home. COVID-19 is a public health crisis and an economic crisis. Our economic recovery is directly tied to public health. The faster we can slow the spread of COVID-19, the sooner we can safely re-open the economy.
In addition to extending the Safer at Home order, we need wide scale testing and contact tracing available across the state to contain this epidemic in the months ahead. DHS has made great strides in increasing testing capacity. But overall, the U.S. remains far behind other nations that have been far more successful in contain the spread and who are closer to being able to gradually opening things up.
Both business leaders and public health leaders agree that wide-scale testing and robust contact tracing is the key to opening up the economy and staying open. We are flattening the curve. The Safer at Home order from March 25th has successfully slowed the spread of COVID-19 in Wisconsin. Now is not the time to change course and reverse the hard-earned progress we have made. This is a matter of health and science, not politics or ideology. We are all in this together.
We stay home for those with higher risk factors, including older individuals, the immune compromised, and those with serious underlying health conditions. We stay home for the front-line.
Rep. Stubbs expressed, “We are flattening the curve. Slowly but surely, we are doing it. Our communities are pulling together and organizing under the harshest of circumstances. This is extremely tough on our businesses. There is only one thing that I know for sure. We are all in this together. We will get through this.”
