Remember we’re still being impacted by Thanksgiving’s aftershocks on #COVID19 reporting. Last Monday, for example, had an abnormally low positivity due to the holiday, so today’s 7-day averages will spike. But last Tuesday had a really high positivity, so they’ll fall tomorrow.
So by report date, MN’s 7-day average positivity rate spiked to over 11% today, the highest all year.
This is to a significant degree artificial, and will fall tomorrow. But even setting aside reporting issues we’re clearly in an upturn right now.
Here, for example, is positivity rate by sample date. This has a lag of up to a week, but all indications are we’re heading upward, driven by post-Thanksgiving infections.
Note this is a near-mirror of a brief spike we had LAST year right after Thanksgiving.
Nearly 7,000 Minnesotans were diagnosed with #COVID19 by cases taken last Monday (not even counting any home tests, which aren’t tracked), the highest one-day figure all year.
The big unknown: how long will this spike last? Is this just going to be a brief post-Thanksgiving spike that will quickly fade? Or is this being driven by deeper factors, and will persist for weeks?
The frustrating thing: we’ve now had two different false peaks in this wave (plus a third period back in early August when growth slowed way down like we were about to peak, before accelerating again).
#COVID19 hospital bed use continues to climb, to nearly 85% of the Fall 2020 peak levels.
Vaccination rates continue to inch upward. We should cross 70% of the total population with at least one dose in a few days.
Vaccinations are still rising for 5-11-year-olds, but they’re very clearly now trailing the rate at which 12-15-year-olds got vaccinated after they first became eligible.
My kingdom for some clean data right now…
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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."