Thread by @dhmontgomery

I’ll start today’s #COVID19 update with the good news: look at booster shots go!

There’s also an increase in first doses among 12- to 15-year-olds, but it’s pretty small compared to past rates they’ve shown. (About 59% of this group has at least 1 dose.)

So, that’s the good news.

The bad news is everything else. Our latest surge continues, with cases and positivity rates both continuing to rise:

This isn’t a fluke of backlogged data or reporting delays, either. Cases are up by sample-date, too.

When you relax the normal 7-day delay on this data, you can see cases by sample-date kept rising all last week (even with some data still trickling in!).

Cases, positivity and hospitalization are all accelerating, and are now equal to or above where we were two weeks ago. (This will likely keep going up for the rest of this week at least, because 2 weeks ago was our little dip — easier to surpass.)

Minnesota’s #COVID19 death rate is nearly as bad as it was during the first wave in April-May 2020, despite 90%+ of seniors now being vaccinated and no major outbreaks in nursing homes (which drove the Spring 2020 deaths).

COVID death rates among residents of long-term care facilities are up a bit, but remain low compared to last year’s waves.

Death rates among people OUT of nursing homes are nearly as bad as they were last fall.

Unfortunately all our data on cases by county, age and race are completely screwed up by Monday’s dump of backlogged reinfection data. We won’t get anything useful here until next week.

There had been some hope that we would just have one bad week, and then get back to decline.

Decline could still come sooner rather than later, but we’re not back yet.