WIZM’s Top 5 COVID-19 stories of 2020

Over the past two weeks, WIZM rolled out its Top 10 stories of 2020. Left off that list were stories that centered around COVID-19.

The newsroom decided to make a separate list for the pandemic, because it would have probably taken up half the top stories.

With that, here is the WIZM Top 5 COVID-19 stories of 2020.

No. 5 — Food Drive Fridays

Early in the pandemic, the La Crosse County Health Department and the Hunger Task Force of La Crosse teamed up to start a food drive.

It was a seven-week run and what a run it had. Hunger Task Force Executive Director Shelly Fortner updated the community each Friday on La Crosse Talk PM, and was continually amazed how the community kept coming through Friday after Friday.

The first Friday drive saw about 15,000 pounds of food collected and each week after that there was consistently about 6,000-8,000 pounds donated.

In the end, Food Drive Fridays around 70,000 pounds of canned goods donated, along with over $250,000 for the Hunger Task Force of La Crosse food bank.

No. 4 — La Crosse School District goes to virtual learning,
pushes back in-person classes to 2nd semester

Back in mid-summer, with a new superintendent, the School District of La Crosse made the decision to go to virtual learning for the first month of the year, and also decided to push fall sports to the spring.

Then, in August, La Crosse County’s health department abandoned the COVID-19 compass without warning and without a replacement.

It didn’t make the school district very happy, as it was one of many entities using the compass to gauge the virus to try and determine when to bring students back to school.

Eventually, the Coulee COVID-19 Collaborative dashboard launched, but the school district decided to go with its own model.

Cases, however, never subsided (see No. 1 below) and the district kept pushing back opening the classrooms. Eventually, with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays approaching, the district made the decision to slowly bring students back to schools, beginning Jan. 20.

No. 3 — Everything’s cancelled, including Oktoberfest-La Crosse

This one’s pretty self-explanatory.

A global pandemic cancelled just about everything. It seemed to start with the WIAA girls basketball state tournament being called off just before the championships, leaving Aquinas High School short of winning another title.

The cancellations kept coming throughout the La Crosse community: Moon Tunes, the WIAA State Track and Field Meet, Riverfest and countless others. Perhaps the biggest cancellation, Oktoberfest.

No. 2 — La Crosse area MMA-fighting nurse Jordan Kaaze heads to
NYC to take on pandemic at its worst

The pandemic continues to hit different parts of the country hard at different times.

The first real scare from COVID-19 in the U.S. came in April out of New York City. Hospitals being overrun, mass graves being trenched as the bodies literally piled up, as more than 700 people were dying a day in the state at the time.

And that’s exactly where Genoa, Wis., native Jordan Kaaze (Nickelatti) felt she was needed.

The MMA-fighting nurse from the small town south of La Crosse, resigned from her trauma nursing job in the Twin Cities and headed for a hospital in NYC.

Four weeks into that contract, here’s part of what she wrote on her experience, “This assignment has really made me aware of the nurse I am and also how human I am. I found a little more of myself in the last 4 weeks and this experience will stay with me forever. The patients and how their appearances change so quickly as they get more sick from the virus. The organ failure, the bleeding (so much bleeding and out of nowhere), the distress, air hunger, the rashes, all the experimental medications I have never heard of but give. … Having them beg me to just let them die.

“The look in the patient’s eyes when they are looking at mine through my hair net, my N95, my goggles, my face shield, my gown, and my gloves like they are studying me and imaging what I look like under all this. Me constantly telling them I am a nurse and I am here to help them. This will stick with me always.”

No. 1 — UW-La Crosse students return, cases skyrocket and
the county hits No. 1 on the NYT’s COVID-19 list

Students returning to campus at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse created a list of stories on its own.

About two weeks after classes began at UW-L, cases in La Crosse skyrocketed.

In the first week of September, the county was averaging 22 cases per day. Then La Crosse hit 75 cases, and it just kept growing, peaking at 254 cases on Sept. 18.

La Crosse hit No. 1 on the New York Time’s COVID-19 list for metro areas where new cases were rising the fastest.

UW-L had to order a “shelter in place” for students in the dorms, as classes went virtual. Masks had to be worn at all times, anywhere on campus.

Cases slowly dwindled to about 40 a day in mid-October, before rising again late in the month and remaining just over 100 a day from there until early in December.

HONORABLE MENTION

It’s probably worth noting how the pandemic got started in La Crosse. The county’s first cases, two women between 20-40 years old, came March 18. From there, it was a case or two every couple of days through mid-June.

On June 17, La Crosse County reported its first COVID-19 death, a man in his 70s.