12 newly reported #COVID19 deaths today — a pretty low figure that’s normal for a Monday. In fact that’s actually up from last Monday’s total of just 4.
But with such small numbers, these don’t mean much — just a statistical blip. The long-term trend is still decline.
Newly reported cases, curiously enough, are EXACTLY the same as last Monday: 980. Here again the long-term trend is down.
This downward trend in cases shows up more clearly when you look at cases by sample date, which aren’t distorted by reporting effects. Last Monday saw a drop in cases, after weeks of increases.
Minnesota’s positivity rate continues to fall, down to 4.5%.
After a blip up the past few days, we’re back to declines in Minnesota’s #COVID19 hospitalizations figures. Still too early to say for sure what the dominant trend now is.
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Reading HW Brands’ “The Zealot & The Emancipator,” I was struck by a good way to analogize Lincoln’s famous lack of political experience — a single, decade-old term in Congress, and a few even older terms in the state legislature, before an unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate. 1/
2/ It’s not that Lincoln was an outsider, like Zachary Taylor, elected president on the basis of his war heroism despite having never served in any prior political office and indeed never really expressing any political beliefs. Lincoln was intensely involved in IL politics.
3/ No, Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s was the 19th Century equivalent of a modern cable news commentator.
This piece gets at an element of the ongoing debate over whether certain terms — “lie,” “coup,” “fascist,” “socialist” — should be applied today. The two sides are sort of talking past each other, with some people focusing on LOGICAL definitions & others on EMOTIONAL ones.
One person says, “Well, I define [Term X] as [definition], and event A, while terrible, doesn’t fit that definition. Rather, we should use [alternative technical term].”
Others basically argue, “Stop quibbling! This is bad, let’s use the term that conveys how bad it is!”
People using “emotional definitions” don’t want to use a dry technical term to describe something or someone they dislike. They want to use a term with a powerful (negative) emotional valence, to capture the proper attitude to the target.
40 newly reported #COVID19 deaths in Minnesota today, down from 44 last Sunday. The 7-day average is down to 31 deaths/day, from nearly 40/day last Sunday.
Meanwhile, Minnesota’s average newly reported daily cases dropped below 1,500/day for the first time since Oct. 17. This is about the level cases were at before the November wave hit.
This isn’t a function of falling test volume, either. (MN’s average testing volume is just slightly higher now than it was in mid-October.)
Minnesota’s average #COVID19 positivity rate is down to 4.6% and falling.
Stephen Douglas “had expected complaints from the likes of Abraham Lincoln, but he hadn’t expected [Bleeding Kansas]. Douglas was cannily smart in the fashion required for success in politics, but he lacked the imagination to see into the souls of extremists like John Brown.”
— HW Brands, “The Zealot and the Emancipator,” on Douglas’ “popular sovereignty” approach to slavery in the territories backfiring.
John Brown, accelerationist: “If Frémont had been elected, the people would have settled right down and made no further effort. Now they know they must work.”
37 new #COVID19 deaths reported today, down from 43 last Saturday — continuing the nearly month-long downward trend in this metric. BUT the death rate is *still* higher than it was in the May wave, even with the decline.
New #COVID19 cases have resumed trending down after our mini post-holiday spike, even if you control for testing volume. Another drop tomorrow and MN will finally fall below the 1,500 average cases/day level it was at before November.
Positivity rate is 4.8% and falling.
A minor uptick the past two days in #COVID19 hospital admissions. Too soon to say if this represents anything significant.
Today, @mnhealth released two days of #COVID19 data in one (data reported on 12/25 and 12/26).
But considering it’s two days of data, it’s pretty darn encouraging! New cases were only up a few hundred, and are STILL below last Sunday’s levels (which was just 1 day of data).
@mnhealth And while new cases went up a little bit over last Sunday (which again isn’t apples-to-apples), new tests went up a ton. So the positivity rate was below 3%.
For the first time since Oct. 7, Minnesota’s 7-day average positivity rate is below the key 5% cutoff.
@mnhealth Deaths were what I was worried about, as they’ve been the highest metric recently. Two days of data in one means we could have easily seen 100+ newly reported deaths. Instead, we got 40.
Now, it’s possible next week will see a lot of backlogged deaths from the long weekend.