MADISON, WI (WTAQ) - The COVID-19 pandemic appears to be on a downward slide in Wisconsin, but health officials say while they're becoming optimistic - it's not quite over yet.
"We're not done until we're highly confident that we have this contained," says Dr. John Meiman of the Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Health, "We still have a lot more work to do, but our hope is that what we're seeing is some of the success of all the work we've been doing over the last few months."
Meiman and Dr. Ryan Westergaard of the Bureau of Infectious Disease continued to urge residents to maintain the safety measures that they have been using for the past several months.
"In Wisconsin, if we can communicate and coalesce the idea that adopting these of infection prevention strategies - like wearing masks in public, maintain physical distance - I think there's a lot of good that can be done," Westergaard says.
There have been questions and concerns raised over the potential of a resurgence of the virus in coming months. A serious spike in cases across the state could cause major issues for those working to treat infected patients.
"If we experience the level of spread of COVID-19 that we do for influenza every year, that could translate to a large number of hospitalizations, a lot of serious illness, and could really be a stretch our health system," Westergaard explains, "That, we find unacceptable. It doesn't mean it won't happen. We could have a very serious respiratory virus season."
But both Meiman and Westergaard continued to express confidence in the growth of programs and systems implemented to counter the spread of the coronavirus.
"We're having 200 cases per day now in the state as we're building our capacity to respond to outbreaks and doing quarantine. It is not impossible that we could contain the number of cases and drive it down further," Westergaard says.
Two new studies to better understand exactly where the virus has hit in the state were also introduced on Wednesday.