Fasten your seatbelts, it’s a rough #COVID19 report in Minnesota today. The most cases in one single day of reporting (excluding multi-day reports) since December 2020. Positivity rate up to 7.9%, similarly the highest since last December.
And before the usual suspects jump into my replies to complain about focusing on (or even mentioning) cases as a metric, hospitalizations and deaths from #COVID19 are also at their highest rates since last December.
That said, for you pessimists looking at the calendar and worrying about *last* November, take a look at the slopes of the two lines here. Positivity rate is going up at the same time it did last fall — but at not nearly the same pace.
In fact, for the vast majority of Minnesotans not living in long-term-care facilities, #COVID19 now is almost as deadly as it was during the Fall 2020 peak.
Our overall death rate is lower because we’re not seeing nursing home outbreaks like last year (though those are up, too)
These newly confirmed cases are concentrated in adults 30-50.
Today’s data is still from the end of last week, so we’ve only got a trickle of new vaccinations from kids 5-11. Those should start showing up in earnest tomorrow.
Overall, 77% of Minnesotans 12+ have at least one vaccine dose. That’s 66% of the total population.
For everyone who wants data by region, that’s still a bit of a mess because of two weeks of backlogged data.
Those have finally cleared our 7-day averages. So these spikes and falls the last few weeks here are artificial.
There’s no great way to smooth this out with the data we have; as a rough heuristic, you might just sort of draw a mental line from where things were before the spike to today, like this.
Cases will cease to matter as a metric when they decouple from deaths and hospitalizations — when we can see cases rise and the other metric (after appropriate lags) don’t budge.
That’s not even close to happening yet.
On days like this, I like to just open up this graph real big and fondly contemplate this past June.
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