Minnesota has closed out an all-around bad week of #COVID19 on a sour note. From Monday through today, our positivity rate rose by 0.7 percentage points, almost erasing last week’s 0.9-point fall. Cases also on the rise.
One week ago, people gave me a bunch of crap for qualifying that week’s decline by saying “the only question is how long it will last.”
I wish I hadn’t been proven right so quickly…
Now, this week’s uptick does not mean cases will continue to RISE indefinitely. It’s entirely possible we’ll get right back to declines next week. The point is, we don’t know the future!
This uptick in cases/positivity is not just an artifact of reporting times. If you look at cases by sample date, you can see this past Monday *already* has more positive cases than last Monday, despite data still trickling in. Monday cases had fallen for two consecutive weeks.
Hospitalizations are mostly flat-ish.
Cases are up everywhere, but especially in western and central Minnesota.
We are seeing a real, significant surge in booster shots, however.
Vax rates will probably rise next week as kids 5-11 become eligible for the shot.
This is a group of about 500K people, representing about 1/4 of Minnesota’s unvaccinated population.
How big a difference will eligible 5-11-year-olds make? Right now 65% of all Minnesotans have 1+ shot.
When 12-15-year-olds became eligible, we saw about 1/3 of that group get the shot within the first month. If that holds for 5-11s, that'd be another 3% of MN’s population.
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