La Crosse County officials could unveil successor to COVID Compass by Friday

By the end of this week, people in La Crosse County should know what will replace the compass system that measured the local threat from COVID-19. 

The county abruptly announced Friday that the COVID-19 compass would be discontinued, and county health director Jen Rombalski said at a County Board meeting Monday night it wasn’t her call.

“I didn’t see it coming,”

“What would happen if we would have an even worse-case scenario, like Racine County or Brown County?” O’Malley asked. “We couldn’t go any further into the red. We were already in to the red.”

Several county board members expressed concern about why the compass was discontinued, without a new measurement system ready to go.  The compass was used by multiple surrounding counties to La Crosse.

, and one supervisor suggested that the decision to scrap the compass might feed into the theory that the pandemic isn’t real.