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.
But it’s striking that cases by *sample date* aren’t showing any uptick.
Now this data is a week out of date. So there could be something from the past 7 days of results that this isn’t showing.
If you include the past week of sample-date data instead of filtering it out, you can see the next few days are due to level out, if not rise again, as this data trickles in. We won’t know which until time has passed.
We’re also not seeing any uptick yet in the count of active, confirmed cases. But that’s partly because the 10-day contagiousness lag in this dataset means we’re still showing the side effects of last week’s fall.
Non-ICU hospital bed use has ticked back up a bit.
Most of the increase in reported cases is happening in Greater Minnesota (but *some* of what this chart is showing is artificial, backlogged cases — no way to filter that out at the sub-state level).
Current cases remain disproportionately in Greater Minnesota, but Greater MN’s share is no longer accelerating.
We are seeing a noticable uptick in booster shots. New first doses remain flat.
I don’t think tomorrow’s data is going to salvage the week, either. Last Friday was a relatively encouraging day, with positivity below 6% and 2,100 cases (less than today).
If we want 7-day averages to fall, we probably won’t see that until next Tuesday at the earliest.
“No principles, any methods, but no flowery language — always Yes or No, though you could only count on him if it was No.” — Clement Attlee on Stalin
“Soviet biologists were instructed to adopt the theories of the charlatan Lysenko… to disastrous effect… It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone & never presumed to second guess *their* calculations. Stalin may well have been mad, but he was not stupid.”
“Fortunately for the West, American popular culture had an appeal that American political ineptitude could do little to tarnish.”
I finally hit on why "Hazbin Hotel" is leaving me so cold. I love a stylized sitcom about depraved souls in the afterlife struggling toward redemption: It's called "The Good Place," & while it lacked raunch, songs & art deco animation, it had sophisticated multi-layered writing.
Partly this is a difference in execution — if you hired Michael Schur to script-doctor the dialogue on "Hazbin Hotel" you'd get a much better show — but in large part it's just intent. TGP was aiming at the border between middle- and high-brow; HH is aiming at middle-low.
I see everything "Hazbin Hotel" is trying to do, and can appreciate it in an abstract sense. It's not a terrible show, it's just, like, a C+. It's competently done and has a few interesting ideas, but (4-5 episodes in) doesn't display any real verve or finesse in its writing.
You BET we polled people about #Napoleon. On the eve of a new biopic, most Americans don't know very much about Bonaparte, and what they do know, they don't especially like.
The U.S. actually has the highest rates of considering Napoleon's legacy to be "negative" of any of 8 countries YouGov polled. That includes several other countries that Napoleon actually invaded, humiliated and occupied.
What DO Americans know — or think they know — about Napoleon? Well, I regret to inform you that one of the most popular descriptors was "short," with no real difference between people who said they knew a fair bit about Napoleon and those who didn't.
cc @WaltHickey @pbump @PatrickRuffini @goodreads @DanielBGreene @aedwardslevy @NateSilver538
How many books do people own, anyway? My @YouGovAmerica survey found most people own at least SOME physical books, but most of these collections are pretty small. 20% of Americans own between 1 & 10 books.
NEW: Full-time caregiving is the #1 reason prime-age Americans don't work. In my latest for the @MinneapolisFed, I break down the stats behind this key demographic group:
Among adults age 25-54, women are 90% of full-time caregivers. But that's down from 96% two decades ago, while the share of full-time caregivers who are men has doubled.
Social conventions, health and individual preferences all impact parents' choices when one of them is going to stay home. But sometimes finances drive the decision, and in opposite-sex prime-age couples, men are twice as likely to be the top earner:
When the @Suntimes ran an undercover bar to catch sleazy officials: "I think one of the things that amazed us is that these inspectors sold out public safety on the cheap. They were not taking huge amounts. We were told to leave $10 for one inspector & $25 for another inspector."
@Suntimes @kottke Also: "[Columnists] smiled & gave me a thumbs-up. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s nice! They liked it!’ And it made me feel good. I was later told they gave me a thumbs-up b/c I got the word ‘ass’ in the paper. They’d been trying to get the word ‘ass’ past the copy desk for years."