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!
This uptick in cases/positivity is not just an artifact of reporting times. If you look at cases by sample date, you can see this past Monday *already* has more positive cases than last Monday, despite data still trickling in. Monday cases had fallen for two consecutive weeks.
Hospitalizations are mostly flat-ish.
Cases are up everywhere, but especially in western and central Minnesota.
We are seeing a real, significant surge in booster shots, however.
Vax rates will probably rise next week as kids 5-11 become eligible for the shot.
This is a group of about 500K people, representing about 1/4 of Minnesota’s unvaccinated population.
How big a difference will eligible 5-11-year-olds make? Right now 65% of all Minnesotans have 1+ shot.
When 12-15-year-olds became eligible, we saw about 1/3 of that group get the shot within the first month. If that holds for 5-11s, that'd be another 3% of MN’s population.
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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.