MILWAUKEE- On the same day he signed a bill allowing dentists to administer COVID-19 vaccine shots, Governor Tony Evers faced questions regarding the Department of Health’s misclassification of COVID-19 deaths related to nursing homes.
Last week it was discovered that the DHS added roughly 1-thousand deaths to the COVID-19 list after initially noting that people died in “unknown living conditions.” Governor Evers Monday downplayed any affect that would have on their response to the pandemic.
“The numbers would not have changed our activity because we knew right from the get go that they’d be in a difficult situation just because there are so many people in such a small area,” Evers said. “We always made sure we had people interacting with, providing the PPE, making sure we had testing sites and lots of people going in there.”
Since the misreporting came to light a week ago, several state republicans including State Senator Alberta Darling and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos have called for an investigation into how the DHS handled the numbers. Today (Monday), Congressional republicans also sent a letter to the Governor’s office saying they were ‘concerned’ with how the numbers were handled.
According to updated numbers, 45% of people who died were in long-term care housing, 25% were not in group housing and 4% were in some other type of group housing.