Thread by @dhmontgomery

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.)