Today’s #COVID19 stats in Minnesota continued to tick up, with positivity rate now at 7.2%. Thankfully, we didn’t see the same explosive growth we’ve seen of late, just minor upticks. (Cases actually dropped week-over-week, but on less reported testing, so this means nothing.)
In general, though, our trend right now is an outbreak that is not just expanding but accelerating.
The number of #COVID19 hospital patients continues to rise, with the silver lining that ICU bed counts are still flat.
Still too early to say whether the last few days’ uptick in cases in the Twin Cities metro is real or a blip. In general the metro still has far fewer confirmed cases per capita than Greater Minnesota does. (Probably no coincidence the metro also leads in vax rate.)
What was in recent weeks an outbreak driven by young people is now growing in all demographics.
Today we finally got new testing data by age, and every single age bracket saw positivity rate surge upwards. The biggest jump was in people 70+, who went up nearly 2 percentage points in a week.
So no, these rising case counts by age aren’t artifacts of testing.
An addendum here: I remove the most recent few days of data from this graph, because it’s often incomplete/unreliable. But today’s data did show an uptick in ICU bed use. Possible this plateau is about to end (like all our other plateaus).
Today also saw a big reported death count, more than double last Thursday. Our daily average is up to 17 COVID deaths per day.
This is perhaps the simplest explanation here. Hard to say for sure, though.
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