Thread by @dhmontgomery

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:

Jan. 4, 2022
Dec. 28, 2021
Dec. 30, 2021
Dec. 29, 2021
Jan. 3, 2022

All within a one-week period.

And data is still coming in for Jan. 4 onward.

Before this, all our records were from November 2020.

(To clarify: Jan. 3 is the record high. Dec. 29 is #2, and so on.)