MADISON, Wis. (SPECTRUM NEWS) -- The Wisconsin National Guard has joined emergency management and healthcare professionals across the state to scale up coronavirus testing as Wisconsin allows more businesses to reopen.

The Department of Health Services is now testing about 11,000 people per day. DHS continues to hire contact tracers, who interview those who test positive to determine who DHS needs to contact and give quarantine instructions to slow the spread of the virus. The National Guard members have administered tests as nurses’ assistants, prepared voluntary isolation centers across the state and helped establish alternative care facilities in Madison and Milwaukee.

The state’s expanded testing program now focuses on screening anyone showing symptoms of COVID-19. DHS’s goal is to test for and trace the virus at such a scale they can recommend quarantine only for specific individuals, rather than the entire state. But it will be a delicate process as the state gradually reopens its economy.

“This is going to be a balancing act on a tightrope walking forward,” said Julie Willems Van Dijk, the DHS deputy secretary. “We all are going to need to change our behavior even as we go out.”

About 150 National Guard soldiers returned from deployment in Afghanistan Monday, touching down in St. Paul, Minn. following a two-week quarantine period at Fort Hood in Texas. The men and women are part of the 1st Battalion, 128th Infantry Regiment who returned home as part of a drawdown in Afghanistan announced earlier this year.