Milwaukee County sets ‘universal face mask policy’ as virus cases rise
With the coronavirus continuing to spread, Milwaukee County will now require all employees and members of the public who use county facilities to wear a face covering.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley issued a “universal face mask policy” Tuesday.
The policy requires all employees, contractors, vendors, volunteers, service users and members of the public who are entering county facilities to wear a face covering. This includes the airport and county buses.
Face coverings help to mitigate the transmission of coronavirus, which spreads through respiratory droplets. Acceptable face masks can be made of cloth or paper and can be a scarf or bandanna, he said. The county will provide masks for many of the people required to wear one, Crowley said.
Children between the ages of 3 and 12 should only wear masks if parents or guardians are monitoring them to make sure they’re worn safely, he said.
The coronavirus has killed 301 people in Milwaukee County as of 4 p.m. Tuesday, according to the county dashboard. More than 9,000 cases have been confirmed. That’s up 263 cases and one death from Monday’s tally.
Wisconsin reported 270 new coronavirus cases Tuesday out of 14,227 tests run since the previous day, placing the percentage of positive tests at 1.9% — a new low since the pandemic began to pick up in the state.
The percentage of positive tests, a metric that health officials once used to guide reopening after Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order, has been on the decline with a few blips back upward since early May. Since May 28, it has hovered at or below 5%.
In May, Ryan Westergaard, Department of Health Services chief medical officer, called the dropping percent positive rate an “encouraging sign,” but warned that it doesn’t signal for certain that transmission rates of the virus are slowing, especially because the state has still tested relatively few of its residents — 368,518 out of more than 5.8 million, as of Tuesday.
On Tuesday, 347,210 Wisconsinites had tested negative, an increase of nearly 14,000 from the prior day. A total of 661 residents have died from the disease, an increase of 15 from Monday, which was the first day in weeks that no new deaths were recorded.
On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Hospital Association reported that 331 patients were hospitalized with COVID-19, just over a third of them in the intensive care unit. In all, 2,904 people have required hospitalization at some point during their illness.