Today’s data showed the 7-day averages for cases and positivity rate ticking up.
I’m here to tell you: don’t panic!
These increases are not so much because of today’s data as because LAST Wednesday was abnormally low. The long-term trends are still hopeful.
Hospitalizations are both trending downward:
Basically: all the signs still point to continued decline in MN’s outbreak.
The big unanswered question: how brisk will the decline be? The past few days have been much slower than last week was.
We are seeing a noticeable (but still small) increase in booster shots in recent days.
With kids 5-11 about to be approved for the #COVID19 vaccine, here’s where Minnesota’s vaccination rates stand by age:
Just a few days left in October, and it seems clear this is going to be the slowest month for new first-dose vaccinations to date — even as a share of the slowly dwindling unvaccinated population.
(November will almost certainly beat October with a pending eligibility expansion)
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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.”
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!
And all the people saying it’s bad taste because they’re doing this instead of passing the BBB bill are just buying into that hoary old “Politician Can’t Multitask” trope.
You see it constantly from all sides. “Why are they wasting time passing Bill X when they really need to pass Bill Y?” Except Bill X is almost never actually impeding the passage of Bill Y, it’s completely extraneous to people actual concern about Bill Y.
Last week was nothing but good #COVID19 news in Minnesota.
It’s hard to judge for sure what’s going on this week — a lot of messy or contradictory data — but we’re clearly no longer in “everything’s getting better” mode. Our positivity is on par with last Thursday’s 6.7%.
A few weeks from now, we may look back at this week as a brief hiccup interrupting a long-term improvement.
Or as the start of a new plateau.
Or as a return to growth.
Hard to say for sure.
Here’s maybe a clearer look at what’s going on. We’ve had a minor uptick in reported cases this week. The uptick is tiny in comparison to last week’s plunge. We’re not yet back to the case levels we saw before the mid-September surge, let alone June.
“So in the sequel, we’re going to spend half an hour of screen time inroducing a new character and his pointless machinations with the Baron on Geidi Prime, all of which cut away from the action we care about on Arrakis.”
Especially since there’s an obvious solution: buff up Beast Rabban as the secondary antagonist; he gets the climactic knife-duel at the end of the film.
Today’s #COVID19 data in Minnesota is sort of like catching our breath after a brutal week.
Cases and positivity rate both ticked down slightly week-over-week, but remain *much* higher than we were — a 7.1% positivity rate, compared to 6.2% last Friday and 5.8% 2 weeks ago.
#COVID19 hospitalizations continue to rise, ESPECIALLY non-ICU, but increasingly ICU bed use, too.
#COVID19 hospitalizations are also rising in the metro, too, where they had been flat and outpaced by Greater MN. (Still need time to see what patterns coalesce here.)
Today’s #COVID19 stats in Minnesota continued to tick up, with positivity rate now at 7.2%. Thankfully, we didn’t see the same explosive growth we’ve seen of late, just minor upticks. (Cases actually dropped week-over-week, but on less reported testing, so this means nothing.)
In general, though, our trend right now is an outbreak that is not just expanding but accelerating.
The number of #COVID19 hospital patients continues to rise, with the silver lining that ICU bed counts are still flat.