Today’s #COVID19 report in Minnesota showed a week-over-week drop in raw cases.
But if you’re not yet adjusting for testing volume, here in the year 2022, you may be beyond my help. The news is still bad; our average positivity rate shot up again, to 15%.
Today’s data are a little weird. We’ve got a big chunk of cases from last Thursday, before NYE, & then a big chunk of cases from the holiday weekend, when few people got tested but a lot of the ones who did were positive.
Again, never read too much into any one day’s report.
Newly reported cases fell overall today, due to lower testing volume, and @mnhealth only releases test totals/positivity rate by county on Thursdays for some reason, but w/ that, overall we’ve still got new cases in Hennepin/Ramsey higher than they’ve ever been all pandemic.
@mnhealth We’re not seeing an OVERALL bump in hospitalizations yet, which is good. But hospitalizations lag cases, so it might just be too early for this wave to show up.
And we ARE seeing a bump in COVID hospital bed use in the metro area, where most of the new cases are.
@mnhealth Death rates are thankfully still falling or flat, but remember this lags case counts by WEEKS. It doesn’t tell you anything about what’s happening right now, it tells you what was happening weeks ago.
Can’t wait until next week when we’ll have enough data for these year-over-year charts to work again.
MN’s rate of new vaccinations remains pretty low. Boosters are falling, too, after a pretty strong initial run.
Overall about 72% of Minnesotans have at least one dose, 66% are fully vaccinated, and 31% are boosted.
In case you were wondering, most of the doses MN is giving out (which are mostly boosters at this point) are Pfizer. J&J continues to be practically nonexistent, except for that first bump back in March/April.
Overall, about 90% of Minnesotans with at least one dose are fully vaccinated, and more than 40% are boosted.
Note these are approximations from population-level data, not based on individual-level data. So subject to some reporting errors. Take as approximate.
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No one would think to condemn the genre of historical nonfiction just because there's a bunch of badly researched polemics on the shelf at Target or Barnes & Noble. The same is true for history podcasts — the problem isn't the medium, which has been used to good & ill effect.
"Ah, but some of the most popular history podcasts are of the worst historical quality," one might say. But so it has always been, in all mediums.
I've been revisiting "The Last Dance" as late-night viewing the past week, and am continually impressed by the quality of its writing as narrative nonfiction.
One key thing that struck me last night: how the documentary handles the BAD parts of Michael Jordan's story.
"The Last Dance" is overall extremely pro-Jordan — unsurprisingly since he was involved in its production. It's been criticized for how it slighted some of the NBA players Jordan came into conflict with.
But — and this is key — it's not purely hagiographic.
"The Last Dance" spawned a bunch of imitation documentaries as other athletes and celebrities tried to capture that magic for themselves. I've seen a few, and they're often not good — in part because they're TRYING to avoid controversy. TLD's director Jason Hehir knew better.
If Walz resigns as governor to become vice president, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan will become governor.
It's what happens next that gets INTERESTING. The President of the MN Senate (currently Minneapolis Democrat Bobby Joe Champion) becomes Lt. Gov....
The Minnesota Senate is currently split 33-33 between Democrats and Republicans, with one vacancy on the ballot this fall that's probably Lean D. If Champion resigns, that could lead to either a temporary Republican majority, or extended 33-33 tie, until Champion's replaced.
But it turns out that it's a murky, unsettled legal question whether Champion will HAVE to resign. Minnesota went through this issue a few years ago, when Tina Smith resigned as LG to accept a U.S. Senate appointment, and Republican Michelle Fischbach became LG.
“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.