DHS: COVID-19 web pages will face weekend outage as system upgrade takes place

By: CBS 58 Newsroom

Posted: Oct 16, 2020 3:17 PM CDT

WISCONSIN (CBS 58) -- A brief outage will affect COVID-19 reporting over the weekend, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

The department says the Wisconsin Electronic Disease Surveillance System will undergo system improvements this weekend, in order to increase COVID-19 mitigation efforts throughout the state.

The upgrade will reportedly "improve tools for contact tracing, automate data entry, enhance security features, and strengthen the system to accommodate any increase in cases."

The system will experience an outage during this time, and data and statistics on the DHS COVID-19 web pages will not be updated until the upgrade is complete.

The outage will begin at 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 16.

During this time, DHS says alternative methods for data collection will be used. They say contact tracing may be impacted, however the department is increasing staffing before and after the update to account for the outage.

DHS says reporting of test results will not be impacted.

Updates are scheduled to go live on Monday, Oct. 19, and accurate reporting of the visualizations and data on DHS web pages should resume by Tuesday, Oct. 20.