Thread by @dhmontgomery

I wish I had good news for you, Minnesota, but #COVID19 cases are growing rapidly — at basically the pace we saw this time last year.

Positivity rate is also rising, perhaps slightly less dramatically, but still at an aggressive pace. We’re now over 9%.

Hospitalizations are also surging upward, for you “cases don’t matter” people. (They do matter, because there’s clearly still a tight statistical relationship between cases and more serious metrics like hospitalizations and deaths.)

Hospitalizations are rising everywhere, but especially rapidly in metro-area hospitals.

Cases are rising everywhere in Minnesota. Overall case levels remain lowest in the most heavily vaccinated parts of the state.

#COVID19 deaths are also at their highest levels all year. Still far below the Fall 2020 peak — but we’re not that far off where we were at this time last year.

Minnesota’s death rate is below last year’s peak, but under the hood things are different. Last year’s #COVID19 death rates were driven by residents of nursing homes, where deaths are MUCH lower.

People outside of long-term care are dying at almost the same rate as last fall.

Newly eligible 5- to 11-year-olds have pushed Minnesota’s first-dose vaccination rate over 5,000 cases per day for the first time since August (when this was driven by 12-15-year-olds). Boosters at a new high ~20K/day.

Ignore the subzero “Final” line, that’s a data artifact.

So far 5- to 11-year-olds are being vaccinated at slightly less than the pace we saw when 12- to 15-year-olds first became eligible, but faster out of the gate than other age groups. (Many others had supply limitations at initial eligibility, though.)

Most of the Midwest is seeing cases rise, but Minnesota has the biggest surge:

There is one bit of good news in today’s data: we successfully bullied @mnhealth into releasing nominal case counts by vaccination status! (The bad news: they did this after I spent 8 hours trying to reverse-engineer this yesterday, mostly successfully.)

@mnhealth There’s now spreadsheets on their breakthrough page, updated on Mondays, with nominal as well as age-weighted counts of cases, hospitalizations and deaths by vax status. Weekly, but way better than what we had.

@mnhealth So here’s what we’ve got. Around 40% of MN’s current cases in people 12+ are in fully vaccinated people right now, a figure that has risen steadily.

BUT! This is not concerning — it’s exactly what we’d expect! 70%+ of Minnesotans 12+ are fully vaccinated; much higher among 65+.

@mnhealth If you’ve got a vaccine that significantly reduces the risk of infection, hospitalization or death, but doesn’t reduce it to 0, and a major share of the population is vaccinated, then by simple math you’d expect breakthroughs to be a large share of total incidents.

@mnhealth And based on this observational data — which isn’t as informative as a randomized control study — cases are about 4 times more prevalent among unvaccinated Minnesotans than the vaccinated.

Hospitalizations and deaths are about *16 times* more prevalent among the unvaxxed.

@mnhealth #COVID19 deaths are currently *16 times* less prevalent among vaccinated Minnesotans than unvaccinated Minnesotans.

Something like 75% of COVID deaths are among seniors right now. 92% of MN seniors are vaxxed. Those 8% who are unvaxxed are accounting for 60% of deaths.

@mnhealth Or, well, adjust these numbers for the 75% share. I’ll crunch this math later and write it up in my newsletter today. The general point still holds.

@mnhealth Another striking aspect of this data: the relative prevalence of #COVID19 cases, deaths and hospitalizations in Minnesota has been basically flat for months, even as all three have surged.

@mnhealth Some of you have asked for data on breakthrough prevalence by age. Here’s what we’ve got. Messy in places.

1) No significant drops in recent months. Some increases!
2) Interesting case split where breakthroughs are less common among both teenagers & the elderly than adults.

@mnhealth It’s technically true that MN's data doesn’t show a 95% reduction in hospitalizations or deaths among the vaccinated population.

We’re at 93.2% and 94%, respectively.

(That’s just what the ~16-fold reduction I graphed — — represents, just inverted.)

@mnhealth Here’s the data I presented earlier — showing a 16-fold reduction in #COVID19 hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated, and a 4-fold drop in cases, but inverted to show the same numbers as percent reductions:

@mnhealth I went into the raw age data, did a little dark magic, and came up with some slightly more precise estimates for this example.

The week of 10/3, where this data was from, saw about 120 senior deaths, 80 unvaccinated.

8% of seniors w/out vax accounted for 67% of deaths.