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.
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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."