No end in sight for Minnesota’s latest #COVID19 surge.
Cases: up, averaging 3,600/day
Positivity: up, to 8.9%
Hospital bed use: up, to 1,125
Today’s data does include about 1,000 slightly backlogged cases from the weekend, but even if you subtract those, we’re still up significantly week-over-week.
It’s worth noting that cases ARE up more dramatically than positivity rate, indicating that a least some of our case growth may be driven by expanded testing. But positivity rate is still up 34% (or more than 2 percentage points) in the past two weeks.
Cases are rising in every part of Minnesota, but remain much less common in the Twin Cities metro than in Greater Minnesota; the metro is, probably not coincidentally, the most heavily vaccinated area of the state.
Both #COVID19 cases and deaths are disproportionately likely to happen in Greater Minnesota right now (though cases aren’t so disproportionately weighted outside of the metro as they were in September).
Working-age adults 20-50 are the most likely to have #COVID19 cases right now, though cases are up across the board from youngest to oldest.
But when you adjust for testing volume, kids 10-19 have the highest positivity rate of any age bracket, close to 12%.
This is also up in every age group, though most gradually in the 70+ group.
It’s still early days and a little hard to make out, but so far vaccinations for 5-11-year-olds in MN is just slightly behind the pace we saw for 12-15-year-olds.
It was a few days further ahead when we saw 12-15-yo vaccinations really take off. Some of this may be reporting…
(The “days since 1% was vaccinated” cutoff is necessary because 16-17-year-olds had a long period where a small share with serious health issues were eligible, but the rest weren’t. It wasn’t an accurate comparison to measure from 0 with this.)
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“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."