Thread by @dhmontgomery

The good news in today’s #COVID19 report for MN: as I said yesterday, data issues had artificially inflated our positivity rate; today’s data sorted that out.

The bad news: we’re still (just) north of 10% and much higher than the 9.2% we were at last last week.

You can see this spike and fall as a near mirror-image of last year — off by one day, in fact. This isn’t so much seasonal patterns in Thanksgiving *infection* as seasonal patterns in Thanksgiving *reporting*.

The rest of this week will be key to figuring out where we’re headed.

That said, seasonal patterns in infections are playing a role here, too. Here’s our sample-date positivity chart (which lags by a week), also closely matching last year.

Everyone would be very grateful if we follow last year’s patterns and see case metrics plunge in the coming days and weeks. Will it? Who knows.

Hospitalizations, at least, are at a much lower level than last year’s peak. (How much of this is caused by limited bed availability is difficult to impossible to quantify.)

Deaths are worryingly comparable to last year. And remember that at this time last year, we still had weeks of rising death tolls ahead of us before this lagging metric peaked.

This surge in deaths is happening despite the fact that compared to last fall, MN has significantly mitigated #COVID19 fatalities in nursing homes.

The #COVID19 death rate *outside* of long-term care is worse than we ever saw last fall.

Something new: after months as the region of Minnesota with the lowest #COVID19 case rate per capita, Hennepin & Ramsey counties have fallen behind western Minnesota (which was hard-hit earlier). Unfortunately we don’t have good daily data on positivity rate by county.

#COVID19 case counts per capita in the Twin Cities metro are now roughly comparable to rates in Greater Minnesota.

But the (well-vaccinated) metro stil has a COVID death rate *half* of the rest of the state.

A follow-up on death rates. While the general trends I shared earlier are true, the magnitude of these trends is amplified a little bit by holiday data artifacts (0 deaths reported last Tuesday, 100 reported last Wednesday).

Minnesotans in their 30s are by far the most likely to have confirmed #COVID19 cases right now.

Here’s something new: Minnesota has its first-ever county reporting more than 90% of residents 12 or older have at least one dose. The prize goes to Olmsted County. (Though note this data has been subject to periodic revisions as people’s homes are categorized more precisely.)

More than one-quarter of 5- to 11-year-olds in Minnesota now have at least one dose, and almost 9% are now fully vaccinated.