Thread by @dhmontgomery

Minnesota is clearly seeing cases and positivity rise.

What’s not clear is the degree to which this is an omicron explosion like other states have seen, vs. a more temporary holiday bump. (Some of both to be sure.)

Note that a 2022 line won’t show until we’ve got 2 data points.

Note: Today’s #COVID19 report in MN is actually what we would have gotten last Friday if not for the holiday; most of today’s newly reported cases were from last Monday and Tuesday.

All our data is affected by the holidays now and should be taken with a big grain of salt.

Fortunately, new #COVID19 hospital admisions are still falling. (Remember this data is through the end of last week, no 2022 yet.)

Hospitalization data lags behind cases, so we might not necessarily expect this to rise yet — though some evidence omicron is milder. Wait & see.

The share of MN’s #COVID19 cases that are confirmed reinfections continues to spike — just as it did in June/July when delta was becoming dominant in MN.

My earlier caveats aside, I think the evidence is growing pretty strong that Minnesota IS seeing an omicron spike of some degree. Why?

After Thanksgiving, case counts spiked everywhere. Holiday spike.

Right now, cases are mostly spiking in one part of the state — the metro.

Another week of lagged breakthrough data takes us to the beginning of December. Adjusting for age, the unvaccinated that week were more than 12 times more likely to be hospitalized and more than 15 times more likely to die from #COVID19 than the vaccinated.

The lag means our breakthrough data is pre-omicron, so don’t draw any conclusions about the new variant from this.

Note the trends, though: a slight gradual decline in observed relative protection vs. cases, but a gradual INCREASE in relative protection against serious illness.