Last week was nothing but good #COVID19 news in Minnesota.
It’s hard to judge for sure what’s going on this week — a lot of messy or contradictory data — but we’re clearly no longer in “everything’s getting better” mode. Our positivity is on par with last Thursday’s 6.7%.
A few weeks from now, we may look back at this week as a brief hiccup interrupting a long-term improvement.
Or as the start of a new plateau.
Or as a return to growth.
Hard to say for sure.
Here’s maybe a clearer look at what’s going on. We’ve had a minor uptick in reported cases this week. The uptick is tiny in comparison to last week’s plunge. We’re not yet back to the case levels we saw before the mid-September surge, let alone June.
But it’s striking that cases by *sample date* aren’t showing any uptick.
Now this data is a week out of date. So there could be something from the past 7 days of results that this isn’t showing.
If you include the past week of sample-date data instead of filtering it out, you can see the next few days are due to level out, if not rise again, as this data trickles in. We won’t know which until time has passed.
We’re also not seeing any uptick yet in the count of active, confirmed cases. But that’s partly because the 10-day contagiousness lag in this dataset means we’re still showing the side effects of last week’s fall.
Non-ICU hospital bed use has ticked back up a bit.
Most of the increase in reported cases is happening in Greater Minnesota (but *some* of what this chart is showing is artificial, backlogged cases — no way to filter that out at the sub-state level).
Current cases remain disproportionately in Greater Minnesota, but Greater MN’s share is no longer accelerating.
We are seeing a noticable uptick in booster shots. New first doses remain flat.
I don’t think tomorrow’s data is going to salvage the week, either. Last Friday was a relatively encouraging day, with positivity below 6% and 2,100 cases (less than today).
If we want 7-day averages to fall, we probably won’t see that until next Tuesday at the earliest.
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