Alright Minnesota. Make sure you don’t have a mouth full of water right now, because today’s #COVID19 report is eye-popping.
Ready?
By report date, Minnesota just set a new record high 7-day average case count.
Now, SOME of these new cases are backlogged. Some 8,000 of today’s record of nearly 30K new cases are more than a week old. (And remember this is a report covering multiple days.)
But even if you subtract those backlogged data, you’ve still got a record of more than 20K cases.
It’s hard to tell exactly whats happening, but this isn’t just an artifact of reporting issues.
Most of the data’s in now from Jan. 3 tests, and we’ve set a new record for most cases from a single day of testing — more than 11,000.
Our positivity rate by sample date data is still unsteady, with data from the past week trickling in, but we’re at or near a record high for the entire pandemic.
OK, so maybe you don’t think case counts matter much. Let’s look at hospitalizations, then. This metric lags case counts, but we are seeing non-ICU admissions rise steeply.
Don’t take this chart of cases by geography literally, because it’s by report date and is skewed by backlogged data.
But with those caveats, this suggests this case spike isn’t only in the Twin Cities metro any more like we saw last week.
This is pretty much what we should expect to see happening, since cases are spiking across the entire Midwest.
MN’s #COVID19 hospitalization levels only came down a little bit from our delta peak last month, so even if this omicron surge only leasts to small increases in hospitalizations, that could be enough to set records.
The #takes are coming fast and furious in my replies today.
Sadly for some of you, Twitter’s algorithm is judging a lot of them to be “low quality” and automatically filtering them out.
In many cases I only notice a filtered reply because someone whose tweets AREN’T filtered out gets into an argument with the first person; I see the replies but not what they’re replying to.
As of right now, Minnesota’s top five days for cases by sample date are:
“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."