Between September and December of 2020, the Sokaogon Chippewa Community in Mole Lake logged 78 cases of COVID-19.
Then Omicron came, and in January alone, that number more than doubled.
Nearly 150 people who live in the Mole Lake community tested positive for the virus last month.
“We’ve never seen the amount of cases we’ve seen in the last month,” Jake Goodin, the tribe’s public information officer, says. “This has been by far the most.”
Throughout the course of the pandemic, the Sokaogon Chippewa Community has taken an aggressive approach to stopping the spread of COVID.
The tribe shut down its casino and hotel for months when the pandemic began to deter tourists.
And it still enforces a mask mandate for tribal employees.
Goodin says this was an attempt to limit the virus’s spread among office workers.
“But even though we had our masks on, everybody still got it,” he says. The tribe had to limit hours to deal with being short-staffed.
But now, as cases fall, Goodin is hopeful for the future.
“People that haven’t had COVID is far less than people who have had it now,” he says, “so we’re close to reaching, at least maybe around this area, something close to herd immunity.”
The question now, he says, is whether a new variant will mean more people getting reinfected.
