Every year, we in West Saint Paul, Minnesota get our property tax notices in the mail. Every year, people ask the same questions in the West St. Paul Neighbors Facebook hellscape group. What the heck is going on with my property taxes? Is the city council robbing us blind? Or am I just house-wealthy and paying for it?

These questions are very reasonable! Property tax is weird.

It’s easy to understand a sales tax: I spent $100 dollars at Kohl’s Target, so I must pay an extra $7.60 to Mr. Government ($6.90 to Minnesota, $0.50 to West Saint Paul, and $0.20 to Dakota County).

It’s easy to understand an income tax: I made X dollars this year, so I must pay Y% of those dollars to Mr. Government. Figuring out X and Y takes a lot of math and reading IRS documents, which is why most people have tax preparers do it for them, but we all get the gist of an income tax.

Property taxes are harder. I don’t use a tax preparer for my income taxes, I normally do them by hand, so I’m pretty good at reading tax documents for a total layman… but even I find the property tax process weird and confusing. The city website features this earnest but devastatingly uncanny movie, but it’s not very specific. It took me years to work out this simple understanding of the process, and I’m still not certain it’s 100% correct. (If you see an error, please let me know!)

Property Tax is Actually a Bunch of Different Taxes Smushed Together

Here’s my property tax notice for 2022: https://gis.co.dakota.mn.us/content/tnt/42-01800-82-130.pdf

Don’t worry, I didn’t just post my private information online! In fact, property tax information (including the name of each property owner) is public information. You can look up the property tax info and deed owner for literally any address in West Saint Paul using Dakota County’s wonderful GIS tool, and pretty much everyone’s address is public through either TruePeopleSearch.com or TheRealYellowPages.com or (for a nominal fee) WhitePages.com. (The county auditor also has a public voter file with addresses, but I think you have to drive to get it.) This is a fun way to spend an evening if you’re as lame as me.

I looked through about a dozen property tax notices picked at random from around WSP, but mine’s pretty typical, so let’s walk through it. Dakota County officially believes I will owe a total of $3,826 in property tax next year. However, that number is actually a bunch of different taxes added together into one number. As you can see, I’m actually getting my property taxed by:

• Dakota County ($630)
• The City of West Saint Paul ($2,063)
• Minnesota Independent School District #197 (Mendota-Eagan) ($981)
• The Met Council ($58)
• “Other Special Taxing Districts” ($93), which is maddeningly vague but seems to be (based on this):
  • Metropolitan Mosquito Control District (since 1958!)
  • Metro Transit
  • South Metro EMS
  • Many Dakota County residents also pay into a watershed district, usually the Vermillion, but, as far as I can tell, no one in West Saint Paul is in a watershed.

All these different groups are taxing your property, all of them separate from each other. For simplicity, Dakota County collects all* these separate taxes in one big check—but, when your property tax suddenly goes way up, this makes it difficult to tell exactly who’s responsible. Did the schools get more expensive? The light rail line? Did South Metro EMS need a new ambulance? To figure this out, you have to go item by item.

How These Numbers Get Picked

The biggest line item by far is the tax for the City of West Saint Paul. This is also the line item that increased the most from 2021 to 2022. This is true not just for me, but for everyone whose property tax statement I looked at. West Saint Paul is the big ticket item.

So let’s take a look at how the City of West Saint Paul decided that I owe them $2063 this coming year.

The Levy Amount

Some people say that you should start figuring property tax by looking at your home value. This is wrong and backwards. The city neither knows nor cares what your property is worth when it makes the crucial decision: how much money is the city going to spend this year?

That decision was made in two city council meetings: on August 9th, 2021 (pp5-53), the city’s staff proposed a budget. On September 13th, 2021 (pp71-80), the city council voted to approve it. (Thank you to the West St. Paul Reader recaps for making this info much easier to dig up.)

The details of the West Saint Paul budget are fascinating, but that will have to be a separate blog post. The bottom line is: in 2021, the city had a budget of $45.9 million. Property taxes paid for $17.8 million of that. (The rest of the money came from other sources.)

In 2022, the city cut the budget to $39.0 million, reducing its total expenses. But West Saint Paul’s revenues are also falling, so it needs property taxes to cover more of the total. So, in 2022, West Saint Paul has decided that it needs $18.7 million in property taxes. (A 4.7% increase from last year.)

That’s the magic number: $18.7 million. The city has to raise that amount of money from the properties within the city. Ultimately, your personal city tax is based on that number.

But, first, there’s some math.

Property Valuation

In theory, the City could just say, “Okay, we need $18.7 million and we have 9,174 individual residential properties. Let’s share it evenly! Every property owner in the city must pay $2027!” This is essentially a head tax.

But this would be rejected by everyone as outrageously unfair. It would mean someone living in a tiny $170,000 house on Annapolis would be paying the exact same property tax as someone in a $486,000 mansion on Mainzer—and they’d both be paying the same tax as a landlord sitting on a property worth $22 million. The vast majority of us share an intuitive sense that this would not be fair: wealthier people should pay a greater share of the taxes. So we designed our property taxes to function as wealth taxes instead of head taxes.

Wealth taxes are tough, because wealth is hard to measure. What’s a house really worth? You can’t know until you sell it on a free and open market. This is a big problem for all sorts of wealth taxes. How do you decide how much Jeff Bezos is really worth? So much of his money is tied up in expensive art or investments in other companies or unique real estate or rocket ships—none of which has a universally agreed-upon monetary value. Indeed, this sort of problem has led other countries to abandon wealth taxes.

But America has refined the art of taxing property wealth to a near-science. Here in West Saint Paul, assessors from Dakota County drive around every year and use a bunch of rubrics to make a very educated guess at what each and every property in the area is worth. This educated guess is not final. If you think they’re wrong, you can phone them up and ask them to do a more detailed assessment; if you think they’re still wrong (and you can prove it), you can even take them to court.

Dakota County thinks my house is worth $302,400. I don’t really think my house would sell for that much, but it’s close enough, and I don’t really have the evidence to fight it, so I accepted this figure when they informed me of it last year. So $302,400 is my Estimated Market Value in the upper-right corner of my tax statement.

MN <3 Homesteaders

I live in my own home. Minnesota law likes people who live in their own home (aka “homesteaders”). In a variety of ways, Minnesota massively favors homesteaders, penalizing landlords (although landlords pass many of their extra costs on to renters, who are then screwed). On property taxes specifically, Minnesota gives two big legs up to homesteaders: the Homestead Exclusion and the Homestead Refund. The Homestead Refund (Form M1PR) is a (large) tax rebate you get for being a low- or middle-class homesteader; look it up next time you do your taxes, but I won’t go into it here.

The Homestead Exclusion is just a straight-up property tax deduction. It takes your Estimated Market Value and cuts it down. The smaller your house, the bigger the deduction, because the government does not want to drive poor people out of their houses. (Also, homeowners vote!) If you have a house worth $191,000, your Homestead Exclusion for 2022 is $20,050, so Dakota County has to tax you as if your house is only worth $170,950. My house is worth $302,400, so my exclusion is only ~$10,000, and Dakota County taxes me as if my house were worth $292,400. (The exact formula is set by state law.) Once your home is worth more than $413,800, the Homestead Exclusion phases out completely—the state assumes that if you live in a house that big, you can afford to pay full property taxes on it.

The bottom line is, in the eyes of Dakota County, my house is worth $292,376. That’s my Taxable Market Value.

City Staff Does Some Algebra

After doing all this hard work for every single property in Dakota County, the County informs West Saint Paul of the taxable value of each and every one of them.

Add it all up and you get a number, the total amount of property value in West Saint Paul. Let’s call it $2.65 billion. (It’s not $2.65 billion, because I’ve completely ignored a ton of property types, like commercial and apartment properties, which are taxed at higher rates… but $2.65 billion is a useful example number.)

So the city has $2.65 billion of property laying around, and needs to raise $18.7 million. What tax rate do they need to impose in order to get that $18.7 million? Easy! That’s seventh-grade math:

                total property value * tax rate = desired revenue

Or:

                $2,650,000,000 * [tax rate] = $18,700,000

Or:

                [tax rate] = $18,700,000 / $2,650,000,000

                = 0.7057%

(Again, this gets more complicated when you include the other property classes, which are taxed more than homesteads, but the basic algebra is the same, and that tax rate is correct.)

The residential homestead property tax rate for West Saint Paul for 2022 is 0.7057%. That’s how much the city has to tax each household in order to get the money it needs for next year. The tax rate is flat, so the wealthy pay more and the poor pay less, but it takes an equal slice of everyone’s wealth. (At least, assuming all wealthy people live in big houses and all poor people live in small ones.) Officially, this tax is neither progressive (which would mean hitting rich people harder, like the income tax) nor regressive (which would mean hitting poor people harder, like the sales tax).

My house’s taxable value is $292,376. 

$292376 x 0.7057% = $2063

…and, sure enough, $2063 is exactly how much I owe the city in this year’s taxes. That’s my bit of the $18.7 million.

Don’t Be Fooled

Sometimes, people who want to make some kind of political point about property taxes (pro or con) will try and argue that taxes really went down (in some clever nine-dimensional chess sense) when actually they went up (or vice versa).

For example, as we’ve seen, the West Saint Paul tax levy in 2022 grew 4.7%, from $17.7 million to $18.7 million. So, collectively, our taxes went up 4.7%.

However, the tax rate in 2022 only grew from 0.6966% to 0.7057%. That’s only a 1.3% increase. Some people try to argue that this means your taxes only went up by 1.3%. That’s not accurate. In reality, the city asked for quite a bit more money, but we had more “money” to give them already, so they didn’t need to raise the rates by as much to get what they wanted. (I put “money” in scare quotes because, of course, we don’t actually have the money our houses theoretically “created” this year. We don’t see a dime of that cash unless we sell our houses, and I, for one, intend to die in this house some time in the 2070’s, by which time I expect my house to be worth much less due to age and national population decline.)

Others will argue that your taxes didn’t really go up because the city demanded more money; they went up because your home gained value. Again, that’s not generally accurate. Your home’s value only determines your share of the taxes, not the amount. The levy size determines the amount. There are rare cases where a home’s value goes way up (or down) in value, much more than other houses in the neighborhood. If your home value does something crazy during the year, you may end up paying a bigger (or smaller) share of the $18.7 million than you did in the past, because the city now thinks you are significantly richer (or poorer) than you used to be. For most of us, though, with relatively average home value increases, we’re paying (more or less) the same share of the tax as before, but our taxes went up because the tax is just plain bigger.

(EDIT 17 November: Basically, if your city tax increase is exactly 4.7%, then that’s entirely because of the levy and not at all because of changes in your home’s value. If your city tax increase is 5.1% or 4.3%, you’re still very close, and the overwhelming majority of that increase is due to the city levy increase. The further away your city tax increase is from 4.7%, the more your home value appreciation is responsible. If your city taxes went up 9.8% this year, half of that is the city tax and half of it is because your home value went up considerably faster than the city average.)

So don’t be fooled: if you want to know whether the city raised or lowered taxes, the number you should be looking at is the size of the levy itself ($18.7 million), not the residential tax rate, not the value of your home, not the total value of all homes in the area.

(If you want to be really accurate and fancy about whether taxes are going up, the number you should truly look at is the size of the levy per resident. But our city’s population changes quite slowly, and census numbers usually lag by a couple years. Still, this can make a big difference! Using 2020 census numbers for both 2021 and 2022, I find a levy-per-resident of $864 in 2021 and $905 in 2022…  which works out to a 4.7% increase, exactly the same as if you look at the actual levy increase. But if we assume that our population went up by 100 residents in 2022, the new levy-per-resident is only $900, an increase of only 4.2%. It’d be cool if the city figured out a way to identify and publish this number.)

I should note that the West Saint Paul city government, to its credit, does not make these arguments. Some people in the city have done so (I won’t point fingers), but the city itself always prominently publishes the levy number and its percentage increase; the city never tries to hide the ball by talking about absolute rates instead. Moreover, West Saint Paul’s 4.7% levy increase for 2022 is actually the smallest levy increase since 2014. (See p64 of this document, ignoring the 2022 projection, which turned out to be a little off.) Our taxes are still going up significantly, but less than they have in recent years.

On the other hand, the city expects the 2023 levy to go up by 5.62%, which is closer to the ten-year average increase—and the size of the levy has clearly outstripped inflation, sometimes drastically, on average. (Inflation was well under 2% for nearly the entire 2010s; our property tax levy increases were held to that only once, barely, in 2012, under Mayor John Zanmiller.)

This Is Pretty Much How They All Work

Each of the government units listed on your property tax form goes through basically this exact same process. First, the County/School District/Council decides how much money they need next year. Then, they each add up the total amount of property value in their designated area. Then, they set a tax rate that ensures they get the money they’ve decided on. They apply that rate to the Taxable Market Value of your property, multiply, and, boom, that’s what you owe that government unit for the year.

Of course, every government unit on the list covers a different geographic area, so they all have different property values to work with. The Metropolitan Mosquito Control District covers the entire seven-county metro area, with millions of taxpaying residents, so they need only a very small amount of money per property to make their (already relatively small) budget work. On the other hand, Dakota County has a lot of property… but a lot of it is rural, so the average value of that property is relatively low compared to, say, ISD 197. This variation means every levy has to be calculated separately, with different property rates for each one.

A Couple of ISD 197-Specific Notes

ISD 197 has several different property tax levies, some of which are voter-approved and others which aren’t. These are all broken out into two line items on our property tax statements: “voter approved levies,” which we voted on at some point, and “other local levies,” which is just code for, “This is what ISD 197 is taxing you without your direct say-so.” I have not been able to locate a web page or report where ISD 197 transparently breaks down what each of these levies is, what each one costs, where they come from, and when they expire… but my Internet has been wonky tonight, so it could very well be out there and I just can’t find it.

First, I want to commend ISD 197 for a useful thing it does: while it doesn’t tell us the size of the levies per resident, it tells us the size of its levies per student (and does the same for individual levies). This is arguably the most useful way of tracking at a glance whether the district is increasing its spending because of increasing needs or if it’s just getting bloated.

Interestingly, the district collected $1,073 per pupil in 2021, but, if this West St. Paul Reader report is accurate about the total district budget, then the district spent $14,965 per pupil in 2021. This really shows that all the sturm und drang about the $224-per-pupil levy referendum was pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things; the vast majority of ISD 197’s budget does not come from property tax. (Most of it is from state income tax.)

Second, speaking of that $224-per-pupil levy we all voted on last November… it passed! This does not technically raise our taxes, because this was merely a renewal of a levy that was already in place (albeit at a slightly higher level, because the levy is adjusted annually for inflation).

However, when Dakota County put together these tax proposal sheets, it did not know whether the levy was going to pass or not. So they followed current law and assumed that the levy would fail. Therefore, our ISD 197 line item on this tax statement doesn’t include the levy. Now that the levy has been approved, the actual tax bills we receive next year will be adjusted to account for the continuation of the levy.

Bottom line: the average ISD 197 resident’s actual ISD 197 tax will be about $52 higher than what it says on this form. Mine will be $49 higher. You can compute your share here (enter your home’s Taxable Market Value into the box). So instead of paying $588.70 like my tax statement says, I actually expect to pay $637.70 in the coming year. (Probably slightly higher, but I’m too lazy to figure out the inflation component tonight.)

Property Taxation is a Terrible System

As far as I can tell, Dakota County in general (and each government within it) does a really good job administering the property tax system. Every county in Minnesota has a property tax, and every state in the Union has at least one jurisdiction that charges a property tax, too. As these things go, I have no complaints about how Dakota County, specifically, does it. In fact, I’ve had two interactions with Dakota County assessors since I moved here, and both of those interactions were excellent.

But it’s a pretty rotten system, when you get to thinking about it:

Property tax administration requires a vast national army of assessors to guess at the value of each and every property in the land. They do their best, but their guesses may or may not be accurate. Home value isn’t like income, where we know how valuable the income was because the number is literally printed on the paycheck. Instead, to tax home value, we have to employ essentially a separate detective force just to find out what exactly we’re taxing. This is expensive and inefficient. Politicians in Washington frequently remind us of the vast logistical difficulties and guesswork involved in wealth taxes… so why don’t we apply that same logic to the one wealth tax that just about every American, from the richest to the poorest, has to pay? (If you’re a renter, sorry, you’re paying property tax, too: your landlord just adds it to your rent. You get the tax without the homesteader benefits.)

The complexity of this system makes it non-transparent. That makes it difficult for voters to hold their elected officials accountable. Instead of being taxed a percentage of a concrete number you know really well and have a lot of control over (like your salary, or total household income), you are instead taxed based on a funny little number that jumps up or down based on impersonal market forces you neither control nor fully understand. Because of this wild movement, your absolute tax rates jump up or down, too—often without a clear or close relationship to the overall size of the levy! Many voters end up not understanding who they are paying taxes to, how much the taxes are, whether they’re going up or down for everyone or just them, or how any of it gets decided. Others have to read (or write) 4,500-word blog posts to get a handle on it.

We end up speaking in broad generics, like, “Hoo boy, West St. Paul taxes are getting pretty high, aren’t they? But at least we don’t live in Regular Saint Paul! They’d tax you double what we pay!” But this completely misses the fact that, actually, West Saint Paul city taxes are nearly twice as high as Saint Paul’s tax ($905/resident in WSP vs. $566/resident in SP). It’s just that our county taxes here in Dakota County are so low (less than half of Ramsey County’s) that it somewhat cancels out (and hides) how much West Saint Paul is actually charging us. This confusion, in my opinion, is largely due to the property tax system’s confusing structure. Despite everything Dakota County and West Saint Paul do to make that structure transparent to us, it’s just very hard to keep straight.

The property tax structure is not just confusing and obscure; it’s fundamentally dangerous. Taxes are generally taken from transactions: when you spend money or make money, you pay the taxman a small portion of it. You can factor those taxes into your planning before you spend or earn. When you buy a candy bar, you know to mentally add 7% or so to the sticker price. If you win the Powerball Jackpot, you know you’re only going to get about half the sticker price after the government gets its cut. And we have a whole bunch of safeguards in the rest of our tax system to ensure that, if you earn extra money, your taxes go up a little, but not more than the extra amount you actually earned. That way, you know you always have the money to actually pay the taxes.

But when you buy a house, how much are you going to owe in property taxes over the life of the property? Answer: who the hell knows? Literally no one. Might go up, might go down, might go way up. This isn’t just bad for financial planning; it can put the most marginalized members of our society on a knife’s edge.

Suppose you earn minimum wage, and you’ve spent your whole life scraping together a little nest egg to buy a small $50,000 house to call your own. You pay $210 in property taxes per year, and can just barely scrape that plus home maintenance costs together. And you are happy. But then there’s a housing frenzy in your area. It’s the Hot New Place To Live. HGTV comes to town and starts flipping houses left and right. Over the course of three years, your houses rises in value to $120,000, just because everyone wants to live in your cool neighborhood now. Now your property taxes are (this is true) $654/year. You can’t afford that!

You live on minimum wage. That wage hasn’t gone up. You don’t have any extra money coming in. You haven’t done anything to the house. It certainly hasn’t printed you extra money. Yet your taxes have more than tripled.

You can’t get blood from a stone, so you have no choice but to sell your house and move. But where? The whole neighborhood has gone up in price. You can’t stay here. You’ll have to find another neighborhood to live in. But how can you get to your job from a whole different neighborhood? Now you’re either paying for transit in both money and time, or you’re looking for a new job. You had a social support network in your neighborhood, but everyone else you know just crashed into the same problem, and they’re being scattered to the four winds.

And that’s how property taxes displace impoverished and minority communities, in a process we all know as “gentrification.” We spend all this time as a culture worrying about the community-shattering effects of gentrification (and how it reinforces racial segregation between neighborhoods), but never seem to notice that our state and local governments have direct and absolute control over one of the primary mechanisms driving it. (Between property tax and zoning codes ugh, it seems to be cities, more than any other entity, that drive ongoing segregation.)

Gentrification is even worse on renters. At least homeowners, when they are forced to sell, do generally get some of the benefit of home value appreciation, and they get to choose when and how they sell. When landlords sell, they pocket the profits and evict the residents, often with little warning.

In fact, the whole structure of property taxes is a bum deal for renters. Remember when we said that the property tax is officially flat? In reality, it’s not: it’s regressive. Renters (who are disproportionately poorer) inevitably end up paying the landlord’s property taxes (who else would?) and eat a large share of any property tax increase (although the exact tax incidence is hotly debated among economists). So renters are paying property tax, but indirectly, without the ability to challenge the valuation of their homes, without enjoying the benefits of the Homestead Exclusion, with far far smaller Homestead Refunds (seriously, the difference is stark)… and, usually, apartments are charged property tax at a higher rate than single-family homes to begin with.

Tax us when we sell our houses, heck tax the dickens out of it—that’s income!—but don’t tax us just for living in one. Housing is a basic necessity of life, and the only thing most of us do in a given year to earn this inefficient, regressive tax is keep breathing.

The state of Minnesota already has a state income tax… which means we already know the incomes of everyone in the state. Income taxes are easy to design as progressive taxes (our state’s is particularly progressive), everyone basically understands them, and people will always be able to afford them. Many other states already have local income taxes. I believe we should abandon property tax and fund our towns, schools, and mosquito control agencies through local income-tax-based levies instead.

Of course, it’ll never happen. The system is too big, too interconnected, too universal, and too complicated to transition to a new tax collection method, especially in an era of polarization, bureaucracy, and impotence. There are probably difficulties with local income tax that I haven’t foreseen. (Tell me about ’em in the comments!) But I couldn’t write a whole blog post about property taxes without at least mentioning the deep structural problems with it.

I hope this post leaves you with a better understanding of your West Saint Paul property tax statement!

UPDATE 19 November: The West St. Paul Reader just tackled property taxes as well, and (wisely) spoke to the lady in charge!

Interestingly, the city acknowledged an error in its numbers. The budget reported a levy increase of 4.74%, a figure I used throughout this article. The actual figure appears to be 5.15%. I am not updating the article body, because I think inline updates would be more confusing than clarifying, but it’s worth noting anyway that all my “4.7%” figures should be “5.2%” instead. I have not (yet) double-checked the city’s other reported finance figures.

After three months of stability, a significant covid surge is underway in Minnesota. We are a long way from our hospitalization capacity, and it may get itself under control in another week or two. Nevertheless, public health officials are undoubtedly trying to figure out how to mitigate it, because the surge could just as easily continue.

DETAIL:

The chart really tells the story here. A surge that looked like lots of other false alarms started in the third week of September… but then it kept going into the fourth week of September and the first couple days of October, with a small (but by no means certain) downswing just as the data runs out:

This data lags by six days. “LTC” is short for “long-term care” (basically, nursing homes). The above estimate is for non-LTC cases. (This estimate assumes test positivity rates between LTCFs and the general population are more or less the same.)

So, for people who don’t live in long term care, case counts are approaching the heights they reached in May, at our first peak.

Fortunately, LTCs still seem to be doing fine. Since the most vulnerable people live in LTCs and the most devastating spring outbreaks happened there, this is very good news.

As I state every week, my daily estimate of “actual new cases” is derived by taking the current 7-day average positivity rate, dividing it by 2% to yield a multiplication factor (minimum 1.0), and multiplying the officially reported non-LTC cases by that factor. This is crude enough that, when positivity is significantly above 2%, the precise numbers may be way off… but it should be accurate enough for us to trust the trendline.

Here is the raw, official state data I use to build these estimates:

Despite that giant jump in case counts, test positivity has held pretty close to 5%:

This is because our testing has increased as cases have increased. In the past 14 days, Minnesota has conducted about 23,000 tests per day, on average. For those of you who remember back in April/early May, when they couldn’t break the 10k barrier, it’s pretty cool that we have this many tests now.

Lower positivity rates = fewer undetected cases = more accurate and higher official counts = lower actual cases. The fact that we’ve been able to hold the line on testing even in the middle of a surge is really quite helpful. On the other hand, it has to be worrying to the Minnesota Department of Health that a testing surge this big was only barely large enough to hold the line.

As I noted at the top, all this data lags by 6 days.

The start of the surge three weeks ago coincided with a surge in hospitalizations. This is somewhat surprising, because you would normally expect to see a surge in hospitalizations a week or two after the surge in cases. Instead, the surge starts in both datasets around September 17th:

The header on that hospitalization chart mentions “new data.” That is because, this week, Minnesota switched to a new data reporting system for COVID hospitalizations. It’s pretty slick.

The main new feature (for me) is new information about non-covid cases in hospitals, which allows us to calculate a daily surge capacity (instead of using the crude surge capacity estimates I was using before).

On the other hand, all the numbers are slightly different, probably due to differences in reporting methods. A number of ICU hospitalizations have apparently been reclassified as non-ICU hospitalizations.

However you slice it, though, it’s clear hospitalizations are up quite sharply:

We really do appear to suddenly be back in the vicinity of Minnesota’s first peak, back in early May… except that we aren’t seeing a whole lot of people drop dead.

The reason we aren’t seeing as many deaths seems to be that we’ve done a better job protecting the elderly, particularly those in nursing homes. We should also give some credit to improved covid treatments (thanks, doctors, nurses, and Big Pharma!).

Nevertheless, deaths are ticking up a bit. Hopefully that will soon reverse. However, a big surge in hospitalizations doesn’t bode well.

WHY A SURGE?

Oh, heck if I know. I can fiddle with charts, but covid has defied smarter men than me plenty of times.

Statewide voluntary social distancing levels have returned to pre-covid levels outside the Metro. That could certainly help it spread, and might explain why the Health Department is talking so much about rural hotspots. But could this alone cause that drastic increase? Why the late-September inflection point? And the Health Department is reporting cases rising statewide.

I hear lots of states around us are having bad times of it. We have a lot of commerce and other intercourse with our neighboring states, so, if they get sick, we’re likely to catch it from them. But I lack the werewithal to parse through all the journalism and find out just how bad it is in Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas; tracking Minnesota is hard enough.

The timing of the surge makes me look at school openings with a lot of suspicion. That bums me out, since I’ve been high on school openings. And I mostly still am: there seems to be not much evidence of schools causing surges like this one, school-linked Minnesota covid outbreaks are few and far between, and the National COVID-19 School Response Dashboard (run by School Principals associations) shows no significant differences in infection rates between distance-learning and in-person schools (nationally).

Still: cases started surging a few weeks after the school year started. We’d be silly not to examine whether school is a contributing factor.

Whatever the cause of the surge, it’s happening, and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it at the moment other than keep ourselves safe and don’t take dumb risks! Pretty much the usual!

SELECTED GROWTH RATES

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 30th-Aug 6th: 3%

Sep 4th-10th: -9%

Sep 11th-17th: -15%

Sep 18th-24th: 50%

Sep 25th-Oct 1st: 28%

All data is either directly from here or derived from data from here: Minnesota Department of Health: Situation Update for Covid-19 . I went into a little more detail on some of these data in my post Covid Takes A Breather a few months ago. And I finally uploaded my giant Excel worksheet to Google Sheets so you can see the raw numbers and calculations I am doing. Fair warning, though: I did absolutely nothing to clean it up. It’s a mess. Please enjoy Reinhart-n-Rogoffing me.

As we enter a third straight month of a stable, low plateau in covid cases, it seems safe to say that what Minnesotans are doing to combat covid-19 is working, and we should continue doing it. We should also use this period of stability to experiment with reopening the state in more ways — starting with the return to school.

THE RETURN TO SCHOOL:

It is not clear to me why schools in my county have not resumed in-person instruction for at least elementary students, given the overall stability of the state’s case counts and the success other school systems have had with reopening (including our own local Catholic schools, now open for three weeks without disaster). Believe it or not, my six-year-old’s class has been really good about masking responsibly.

DETAIL:

The fluctuations from two weeks ago did, indeed, revert to the average. Case levels are stable. This data lags by (in this case) six days.

“LTC” is short for “long-term care” (basically, nursing homes). The above estimate is for non-LTC cases. (This estimate assumes test positivity rates between LTCFs and the general population are more or less the same.) And here is the flip side. (Note that daily figures are sometimes negative, as the state occasionally reclassifies LTC cases as non-LTC cases.)

As I state every week, my daily estimate of “actual new cases” is derived by taking the current 7-day average positivity rate, dividing it by 2% to yield a multiplication factor (minimum 1.0), and multiplying the officially reported non-LTC cases by that factor. This is crude enough that, when positivity is significantly above 2%, the precise numbers may be way off… but it should be accurate enough for us to trust the trendline.

Here is the raw, official state data I use to build these estimates:

Some media makes hay whenever Minnesota registers its “all-time highest” daily case numbers. However, a large portion of that is thanks to our expanded testing capacity, which is way, way, way above what we had during our first peak in April/May. That means that while we may be detecting as many — or even more! — cases than we detected during the first wave, there are almost certainly far fewer actual cases around the state. You can see that expanded testing capacity doing its job here:

Lower positivity rates = fewer undetected cases = more accurate and higher official counts = lower actual cases.

As I noted at the top, all this data lags by 6 days.

How are the hospitals doing? They’re working hard, but keeping their heads above water. This data is current as of yesterday at 4 PM:

For our part, we aren’t exactly filling up hospital beds with new patients, either, which is consistent with my estimate that our overall case numbers are holding pretty steady.

Deaths are my least favorite indicator right now, but still pretty flat:

Statewide voluntary social distancing levels remain stable, and our masking compliance seems okay. (However, I still don’t see any movement in the data that seems directly attributable to the mask mandate.)

I will be doing a blog post at some point here revisiting the lockdowns in light of what we know now, but, as a little teaser: I think the principal error we made during the lockdown was overestimating the size of the role government policy can play in social distancing. Solidarity and (largely appropriate) fear appear to have provided most of the benefits of the lockdown period, not the lockdown itself, and misunderstanding this distorted the debate over the lockdownon all sides.

I GOT TESTED

I had a cough last week, so, in accordance with MDH guidelines, I got myself a covid test.

I can now strongly recommend that you not try to get a test from the so-called Urgency Room. I went there because their website promised a 20-minute wait time, whereas my more local clinic said it would be 90 minutes and my local CVS had no appointments until the following day. The Urgency Room’s “20 minute wait time” actually meant that it took 45 minutes to check me in, then they sent me to my car to wait for another 45 minutes to be seen, all while the website still reported a 20-minute wait time. Heck with that.

I got tested at CVS the next day instead. It was relatively straightforward, although I had to give the test to myself, which made me nervous, because I am not good at doing things correctly with my hands. Pretty sure I did it right, though.

My results were negative, so I lowered the state’s testing positivity rate that day. You’re welcome!

SELECTED GROWTH RATES

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 30th-Aug 6th: 3%

Aug 7th-13th: -3%

Aug 14th-20th: -6%

Aug 21st-27th: -2%

Aug 28th-Sep 3rd: 18% (that brief surge I talked about last time did turn out to be real!)

Sep 4th-10th: -9%

Date I expect Minnesota’s second peak to surpass its first peak: [not currently trending in that direction].

Please note that predictions I have made about this pandemic have had some hits and some very notable misses.

All data is either directly from here or derived from data from here: Minnesota Department of Health: Situation Update for Covid-19 . I went into a little more detail on some of these data in my post Covid Takes A Breather a few months ago.

But recent news reports have indicated a covid “surge” underway in Minnesota, and this seemed like a good reason to spend an hour updating my spreadsheets to see where we stand.

OVERALL:

There is no evident surge in Minnesota covid cases right now. Upward trends in confirmed case counts are largely due to increased testing, which is actually good news. Estimated cases are flat, hospitalizations are flat, deaths are flat.

Don’t get careless, because people are still catching covid and dying of it, and carelessness is how we get superspreading and actual spikes. And don’t assume these numbers will stay flat forever. But my recommendations largely haven’t changed.

THE RETURN TO SCHOOL:

I sent my eldest daughter to First Grade this week, full-time in-person, at a local Catholic school. They have been very creative about ways to ensure social distancing. I feel quite safe. However, as a precaution, I have stopped seeing my at-risk parents for the next few weeks while we see whether we actually are safe.

I’m much less confident that colleges and universities will be able to stay open for long, because their educational model simply doesn’t allow the level of social distancing my daughter’s First Grade class has achieved. Local colleges and universities have been ludicrously innovative in some ways (frustratingly pig-headed in others), but I’m not sure anything can keep them running. It will certainly be interesting to see which colleges succeed at in-person education over the next ten weeks or so.

DETAIL:

Our estimated case count remains largely flat. There’s a hint at a small rise right at the end of this data, and preliminary data for next week suggests that this rise is real and we’ll be seeing it next week. However, it’s no “second wave,” and we’ve had plenty of fluctuations of this sort over the past six weeks which soon reverted to the mean. We’ll keep a close eye on this, but, as of right now, it shouldn’t be a major concern for average Minnesotans. This data lags by (in this case) six days.

“LTC” is short for “long-term care” (basically, nursing homes). The above estimate is for non-LTC cases.

Nursing homes have seen a definite rise in cases over the past few weeks, possibly as residents and staff begin to relax tight restrictions from earlier in the pandemic… but they’re still in quite good shape compared to, say, May. (This estimate assumes test positivity rates between LTCFs and the general population are more or less the same.)

As I state every week, my daily estimate of “actual new cases” is derived by taking the current 7-day average positivity rate, dividing it by 2% to yield a multiplication factor (minimum 1.0), and multiplying the officially reported non-LTC cases by that factor. This is crude enough that, when positivity is significantly above 2%, the precise numbers may be way off… but it should be accurate enough for us to trust the trendline.

Here is the raw, official state data I use to build these estimates:

Some media continues to make hay about the fact that Minnesota is now registering its all-time highest daily case numbers. That is true! But a large portion of that is thanks to our expanded testing capacity, which is way, way, way above what we had during our first peak in April/May. That means that while we may be detecting as many — or even more! — cases than we detected during the first wave, there are almost certainly far fewer actual cases around the state. You can see that expanded testing capacity doing its job here:

Lower positivity rates = fewer undetected cases = more accurate and higher official counts = lower actual cases.

As I noted at the top, all this data lags by 6 days. Preliminary data for the most recent 6 days looks somewhat worse, but not worse enough to justify alarm or school closures or anything of that nature.

How are the hospitals doing? They’re working hard, but keeping their heads above water. This data is current as of yesterday at 4 PM:

For our part, we aren’t exactly filling up hospital beds with new patients, either, which is consistent with my estimate that our overall case numbers are holding pretty steady.

I finally redid my deaths chart to show data and trends better, and… well, it shows deaths are pretty flat, with the expected fluctuations when dealing with small numbers. Not sure what else to tell you here:

I’ve been toying with a theory for a few of these updates that Minnesota’s plateau is partly thanks to a spontaneous rise in social distancing, as suggested by the state’s “change in distance traveled” figures. I told you in August that the data lagged by so long that we wouldn’t know the truth until September. Did my theory bear out? Eh, kinda. As our case growth plateaued, distance traveled fell… then ended up rising again, then falling again, and ended up more or less plateauing.

It’s plausible that Gov. Walz’s mask mandate is contributing to this, as it’s now had enough time to “work,” but I don’t see any movement in the data that seems directly attributable to the mandate.

AGAINST CONVENIENT LIES

Nationwide deaths from covid-19: 176,624, +/- maybe 20% due to under- or over-reporting. There are definitely some people who died of car crashes (and under other, less black-and-white, circumstances) who got counted as covid deaths. There are also definitely some people who died of covid and didn’t get noticed, but who show up in the excess death figures (some other excess deaths were people killed indirectly by the lockdowns). Those undercounts and overcounts likely cancel each other out to some extent.

Please do not buy into the ridiculous fake news this week that “only 6% of those people ACTUALLY died” of covid; it’s silly and falls apart the second you open the CDC report the claim comes from and read the related data table in context. I’m going to resort to linking an Instagram doctor who can debunk this one visually, but, seriously, read the report yourself; it’s written in ordinary English. There’s no need for anyone to be dumb about this. Being dumb about it is a choice.

Meanwhile, please stop worrying (read: concern trolling) about Sturgis. It was always difficult to make the case that Sturgis was going to be more dangerous than the mass protests and rioting. Those riots yielded (1) no discernible increase in cases or deaths, and (2) widespread establishment denunciation of the suggestion that the protests could possibly have any bad effects ever (even when those effects were visible on camera). Suddenly rule #2 went away for Sturgis, apparently because it was going to be populated by all those mean, nasty conservatives, and some argued, idiosyncratically, that Sturgis-goers weren’t social distancing as well as looters in a burning Target.

Sturgis ended two and a half weeks ago. If it were going to cause a spike in Minnesota, we’d have seen it by now. We haven’t. If you only condemn or “worry about” mass gatherings with people from the Red Tribe, while giving a pass to or participating in Blue Tribe mass gatherings (I SEE YOU STEVE SACK, YOU JERK), you’re not only making America’s covid problem worse, but you’re one of the causes of that civil war I was writing about for the past couple weeks.

SELECTED GROWTH RATES

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 30th-Aug 6th: 3%

Aug 7th-13th: -3%

Aug 14th-20th: -6%

Aug 21st-27th: -2%

Date I expect Minnesota’s second peak to surpass its first peak: [not currently trending in that direction].

Please note that predictions I have made about this pandemic have had some hits and some very notable misses.

All data is either directly from here or derived from data from here: Minnesota Department of Health: Situation Update for Covid-19 . I went into a little more detail on some of these data in my post Covid Takes A Breather a few months ago.

Reminder: I break these out between long-term care (LTC) and non-LTC residents where possible. Furthermore, I focus on non-LTC because most of the people reading this are not LTC residents, and most of my advice is not applicable to them.

OVERALL:

Minnesota’s covid epidemic is not getting better. But it is also not getting worse. Given what a good position we’ve been in for the past few months, “not getting worse” is really, really good. Continue enjoying your summer safely.

DETAIL:

Our estimated case count over the past almost-month has been remarkably stable. It’s not going down like in, say, Sweden. It’s not going up like in, say, France. (Yeah, Sweden’s getting better, France worse.) Our numbers are just holding steady. This data lags by (in this case) six days.

“LTC” is short for “long-term care” (basically, nursing homes). The above estimate is for non-LTC cases.

But nursing homes also remain stable, with covid nearly but not quite eradicated in LTCFs. (This estimate assumes test positivity rates between LTCFs and the general population are more or less the same.)

As I state every week, my daily estimate of “actual new cases” is derived by taking the current 7-day average positivity rate, dividing it by 2% to yield a multiplication factor (minimum 1.0), and multiplying the officially reported non-LTC cases by that factor. This is crude enough that, when positivity is significantly above 2%, the precise numbers may be way off… but it should be accurate enough for us to trust the trendline.

Here is the raw, official state data I use to build these estimates:

Some media has made some hay about this chart. They have observed that Minnesota is now registering its all-time highest daily case numbers. That is true! But a large portion of that (not all, but lots) is thanks to our expanded testing capacity, which is way, way, way above what we had during our first peak in April/May. You can see that expanded capacity doing its job here:

Lower positivity rates = fewer undetected cases = more accurate and higher official counts = lower actual cases.

As I noted at the top, all this data lags by 6 days. However, I’ve been eyeballing the preliminary data for this week (as I always do), and we seem to be on track for a continuing plateau.

How are the hospitals doing? They’re working hard, but keeping their heads above water. This data is current as of yesterday at 4 PM:

The new hospitalizations seem to be reaching their own plateau after a steady rise — exactly what we would expect to see a few weeks after new cases plateau. Critically, we are still far short of our emergency capacity, which I’ve added to the Total Hospitalized chart this week (thanks to the reader who suggested it). I’ve had to double the height of the chart just to fit the capacity lines:

I still don’t really know quite what non-LTC deaths are doing, but they have definitely gone up since the start of August. That’s not surprising, given the increased hospital demand. (It’s actually surprising it’s taken this long, as I’ve mentioned in previous reports.) Death counts are still not very high.

Why’s this happening? Not sure. There still hasn’t been time for Gov. Walz’s mask mandate to have an impact on most of these figures.

I remain inclined to give some credit to the apparently spontaneous increase in Minnesotan social distancing (in terms of miles traveled per day) that started 4th of July weekend. That data lags by weeks, so we won’t know for sure until September, but that decline in Minnesotan travel does seem to line up nicely with covid’s slowing growth. I’ll keep tabs.

How long will this plateau last? Not sure. As I’ve said before, covid outbreaks are part opportunity and part luck. It seems unlikely that this delicate stability can last for long, but it’s difficult to predict whether the curve will bend upward or downward next.

IN CLOSING, SOME OTHER NUMBERS:

Some of these numbers have changed slightly from previous weeks. This is due to new data, mostly old tests that didn’t get reported in a timely manner:

Average week-over-week growth in est. cases, June 25th-July 1st: 32%

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 2-8th: 32%

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 9-15th: 36%

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 16th-22nd: 18%

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 23rd-29th: -4%

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 30th-Aug 6th: 2%

Date I expect Minnesota’s second peak to surpass its first peak: [not currently trending in that direction].

Please note that predictions I have made about this pandemic have had some hits and some very notable misses.

All data is either directly from here or derived from data from here: Minnesota Department of Health: Situation Update for Covid-19 . I went into a little more detail on some of these data in my post Covid Takes A Breather a few months ago.

Reminder: I break these out between long-term care (LTC) and non-LTC residents where possible. Furthermore, I focus on non-LTC because most of the people reading this are not LTC residents, and most of my advice is not applicable to them.

For about the last month, Minnesota’s covid epidemic has been trending in the direction of a “second peak”. However, this week, that trend stalled out. By any measure, cases this week climbed much less than they did in recent weeks.

This could be just a short blip, but it could also be the start of a second decline. Either way, it’s very welcome news, because it means Minnesota will remain in a covid “valley” for at least a little while longer. Continue enjoying your summer safely.

DETAIL:

As you can see, Minnesota’s case counts plateaued this week. That could be just a “pause” like the one we had in late May, but it could plausibly be the summit of our “second peak”… which would be great news, because this “second peak” was barely anything. This data lags by (in this case) six days.

“LTC” is short for “long-term care” (basically, nursing homes). These are non-LTC cases.

As I state every week, my daily estimate of “actual new cases” is derived by taking the current 7-day average positivity rate, dividing it by 2% to yield a multiplication factor (minimum 1.0), and multiplying the officially reported non-LTC cases by that factor. This is crude enough that, when positivity is significantly above 2%, the precise numbers may be way off… but accurate enough for us to trust the trendline.

Good news continues in nursing homes. My estimates show the same thing the state data shows: that new cases have nearly vanished from long-term care facilities. (This estimate assumes test positivity rates between LTCFs and the general population are more or less the same.)

Here is the raw, official state data I use to build these estimates:

Test positivity rates (higher rates = more undetected cases = higher case estimates) have also plateaued, which is good news. For a while there, it looked like they were just going to keep climbing at 1% per week, but, instead, it has frozen up for the past… almost two weeks! Here, let’s zoom in on this:

Test positivity rates for this week aren’t final yet, but preliminary data shows they’re stable, maybe going down a little. We’re not yet streets ahead, but neither are we streets behind.

Back to bad news: hospitalizations are going up. This data is current as of yesterday at 4 PM:

…but this is to be expected. Cases went up for weeks. Hospitalizations go up a week or two after cases go up, and deaths go up a week or two after hospitalizations go up. If cases remain stable or start to decline, then I would expect hospitalizations to do the same in a week or two… and, happily, we have plenty of hospital bed capacity at this point, because our second wave is nowhere near the Red Zone.

Wait, did I say that deaths go up a week or two after hospitalizations go up? Am I sure about that?

Last week, I thought the jump in non-LTC deaths was the leading edge of the expected increase in death toll after a month of increasing cases. So far, that hasn’t panned out. Indeed, as you can see, the non-LTC death toll jumped down this week just as aggressively as it jumped up last week.

Can we thank Gov. Walz’s new mask mandate for this? Absolutely not. I think a mask mandate is probably good, but the mandate was imposed on July 25th. We don’t even have full data from July 25th yet. Even if it were immediately adopted perfectly by everyone, the mask mandate would take a few weeks to have any visible effect on our numbers. (Besides, remember, we still don’t know how effective cloth face coverings really are, so I’m not getting my hopes up.)

A slightly more promising explanation for this week’s covid stall-out is an increase in social distancing statewide. We’re still waiting for complete data, and it may not pan out… but there was an apparently spontaneous increase in Minnesotan social distancing (in terms of miles traveled per day) starting 4th of July weekend. The timing is just about right to explain a slowdown today. My reservation is that it’s not a very big increase, nor do I see it in other data, but I’ll keep tabs.

So covid growth stalled this week. Why? Not clear. Hopefully it keeps doing that, though.

IN CLOSING, SOME OTHER NUMBERS:

Average week-over-week growth in est. cases, June 25th-July 1st: 32%

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 2-8th: 31%

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 9-15th: 32%

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 16th-22nd: 14%

Date I expect Minnesota’s second peak to surpass its first peak: [not currently trending in that direction].

Please note that predictions I have made about this pandemic have had some hits and some very notable misses.

All data is either directly from here or derived from data from here: Minnesota Department of Health: Situation Update for Covid-19 . I went into a little more detail on some of these data in my post Covid Takes A Breather a few weeks ago.

Reminder: I break these out between long-term care (LTC) and non-LTC residents where possible. Furthermore, I focus on non-LTC because most of the people reading this are not LTC residents, and most of my advice is not applicable to them.

UPDATE 13 August 2020: This post originally posted the week-over-week growth rates incorrectly. Instead of 32%, 31%, etc., the post said case growth was 132%, 131%, etc.. This incorrectly implied that cases were more than doubling every week! Cases in the last week of June were indeed 132% the size of the cases the week before, on average… but that means they only actually grew by 32%. Sorry. Dumb error.

In Minnesota, covid is climbing steadily back toward a new peak. Unless something about Minnesotan behavior changes within the next week or two, we are likely to surpass our April/May first peak in about a month.

However, for now, we aren’t there yet. Continue enjoying your summer safely. Squeeze in an outdoor cookout with 10 or fewer of your more responsible friends, go eat on the patio of that restaurant you love, continue not going to bars, and mentally prepare for the reality that life will likely become more restricted again as fall arrives.

A mask mandate is probably coming from Gov. Walz, and that’s probably good.

DETAIL:

As for the past several weeks, case counts continue to trend upward, but remain well below April/May peaks. This data lags by (in this case) six days.

“LTC” is short for “long-term care” (basically, nursing homes). These are non-LTC cases. As I state every week, my daily estimate of “actual new cases” is derived by taking the current 7-day average positivity rate, dividing it by 2% to yield a multiplication factor (minimum 1.0), and multiplying the officially reported non-LTC cases by that factor. This is crude enough that, when positivity is significantly above 2%, the precise numbers may be way off… but accurate enough for us to trust the trendline.

Here’s some good news, though: my estimates show that the epidemic has gone to a very low ebb in long-term care homes. It was killing grannies left and right just a few months ago, but now we’re seeing very few cases, even with expanded testing:

Here is the raw data I use to build these estimates:

This positivity chart is also okay news. While our test positivity rates are getting higher (indicating that we are missing more cases), it appears that we are still detecting most cases of covid. I worried we would quickly lose control of disease surveillance when the second wave came. We may still, but we are holding on for now.

Back to bad news: hospitalizations are going up. This data is current as of yesterday at 4 PM:

It seems the laws of epidemic arithmetic are still holding, despite my hopes: more cases in the past few weeks has led to more hospitalizations today. More hospitalizations today means more deaths in a few weeks. Perhaps the deaths will be fewer, because more young people are getting it, but deaths are unlikely to stay in decline.

For now, though, deaths are indeed down, and we can continue to celebrate that… even as we see what looks like the beginnings of a trend in the other direction:

IN CLOSING, SOME OTHER NUMBERS:

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 2-8th: 31%

Average week-over-week growth in estimated cases, July 9-15th: 32%

Very rough estimate of pre-symptomatic/early-symptomatic Minnesotans outside LTCs, as of July 15th: 8,000

Where that number was on May 15th, at first peak: 23,500

Very roughly where I expect that number to be as of today, once we have all this week’s data in: 10,500.

Very roughly where I expect that number to be in a week: 14,000

Very roughly where I expect that number to be in two weeks: 18,000

Very roughly where I expect that number to be in three weeks: 23,500

Date I expect Minnesota’s second peak to surpass its first peak: August 19th.

Please note that predictions I have made about this pandemic have had some hits and some very notable misses. The pandemic may surprise us by slowing down again, just like it did in May, and I hope it does.

All data is either directly from here or derived from data from here: Minnesota Department of Health: Situation Update for Covid-19 . I went into a little more detail on some of these data in my post Covid Isn’t Killing Minnesotans Like It “Should” a few weeks ago.

Reminder: I break these out between long-term care (LTC) and non-LTC residents where possible. Furthermore, I focus on non-LTC because most of the people reading this are not LTC residents, and most of my advice is not applicable to them.

UPDATE 13 August 2020: This post originally posted the week-over-week growth rates incorrectly. Instead of 32%, 31%, etc., the post said case growth was 132%, 131%, etc.. This incorrectly implied that cases were more than doubling every week! Cases in the last week of June were indeed 132% the size of the cases the week before, on average… but that means they only actually grew by 32%. Sorry. Dumb error.

In Minnesota, covid is still in a valley, not a peak, but there are growing signs of a second wave. Fortunately, the new wave is coming much more slowly than the last one, and it may still dissipate before developing into much of anything. Minnesota is by no means in the dire straits that some Southern states are currently in, nor is it likely to find itself in the even-more-dire straits that some of the Northeastern states experienced in April and May.

Continue enjoying your summer safely, with an emphasis on outdoor activities and small gatherings — but begin mentally preparing for a possible shift back toward a more restrictive outlook.

A mask mandate is probably coming from Gov. Walz, and that’s probably good.

DETAIL:

As last week, case counts continue to trend upward, but remain far below April/May peaks. This data lags by (in this case) six days.

As I state every week, my daily estimate of “actual new cases” is derived by taking the current 7-day average positivity rate, dividing it by 2% to yield a multiplication factor (minimum 1.0), and multiplying the officially reported non-LTC cases by that factor. This is crude enough that, when positivity is significantly above 2%, the precise numbers may be way off… but accurate enough for us to trust the trendline.

The trendline is currently heading up after several weeks of steep decline, and that is bumming me out. On the graph, it doesn’t look like much, because the April/May peak was so much higher… but my estimate indicates that Minnesota’s case count bottomed out three weeks ago, on June 21st, and that the number of cases jumped 50% between June 24th and July 1st. That’s slower than the extremely fast spread we saw in late April… but, if we keep on this pace, we’ll get back to May/April peaks in fairly short order. Hopefully we won’t.

Here is the raw data I use to build this estimate:

I take great comfort from the fact that test positivity rates are still holding under 4%. The ideal is 2%, but 5% is the WHO’s official guideline. That means, even though covid is spreading faster again in Minnesota, it’s likely we’re still catching the majority of our covid cases. States like Arizona, with positivity rate over 25%, are likely catching fewer than 1-in-20 of their actual cases — which makes their high reported case loads all the more alarming.

Unfortunately, this is probably the last week we’ll be able to say that. Preliminary data for July 7th-July 12th is not included in these charts, because it’s preliminary… but I can already see that test positivity is going to be over 4% on at least two days next week. That means there will be a bigger gap between “officially reported” new cases and actual new cases.

Good news, though: hospitalizations are still flat, as they have been for nearly a month. Unfortunately, there are indications in the Southern states currently experiencing an outbreak that more cases is likely to lead to more hospitalizations, so we may see this number tick up in the next week or two — but we haven’t yet, and I’ll take that win.

This data is current as of yesterday at 4 PM:

Deaths, happily, continue to trend downward. This still appears to be simply because we’ve had fewer cases. Now that cases are going back up, we should watch out for deaths ticking up in 2-3 weeks… but, hopefully, the uptick will be just as slow as the growth in cases.

All data is either directly from here or derived from data from here: Minnesota Department of Health: Situation Update for Covid-19 . I went into a little more detail on some of these data in my post Covid Isn’t Killing Minnesotans Like It “Should” a few weeks ago.

Reminder: I break these out between long-term care (LTC) and non-LTC residents where possible. Furthermore, I focus on non-LTC because most of the people reading this are not LTC residents, and most of my advice is not applicable to them.

OVERALL:

In Minnesota, covid is still in a valley, not a peak. There are signs that may be changing, but they are developing slowly and aren’t clear yet. Continue enjoying your summer safely, with an emphasis on outdoor activities and small gatherings. Do not visit, e.g., Arizona.

DETAIL:

Case counts definitely trending upward, but still far below April/May peaks. This data lags by (in this case) six days.

Positivity rate is rising in parallel with rising case counts, and my case estimator hates rising positivity rates — but it’s rising slowly enough, and is still close enough to the 2% ideal, that my estimate shows a slope, not a spike. This data also lags by six days.

(For those interested, my daily estimate of “actual new cases” is derived by taking the current 7-day average positivity rate, dividing it by 2% to yield a multiplication factor (minimum 1.0), and multiplying the officially reported non-LTC cases by that factor. This is crude enough that, when positivity is significantly above 2%, the precise numbers may be way off… but accurate enough for us to trust the trendline.)

Hospitalizations are flat, about where cases were two weeks ago in reality. This data is current.

The state reported no data on July 4th (they took the day off for the first time since March), hence the down-spike on the 4th followed by the up-spike in “new” hospitalizations on July 5th. July 5th is simply both days combined:

I wouldn’t be shocked to see hospitalizations rise in the next few days, as new cases start to turn into new hospitalizations. On the other hand, as cases become more concentrated among young people, I wouldn’t be shocked to see hospitalizations hold steady, or perhaps even decline.

Deaths are flat or declining, depending on what slice of data you’re looking at and how hard you squint. This data is current — but remember that it takes several weeks to die of covid, so, if cases go up, you’d expect to see deaths rise in 1-4 weeks.

There’s still no indication in my data that the death count is improving because hospitals are getting better at treating this. By dividing deaths by my estimate for the actual number of cases, I’m able to come up with a rough estimate of infection mortality in Minnesota. It’s been holding steady in the vicinity of 0.5%-0.6% for a while, right in line with global estimates of how deadly covid is.

In other words, deaths seem to be falling solely because cases fell several weeks ago. As cases go up, we should anticipate deaths will go up in a few weeks. On the other hand, as young people become a greater proportion of the infected, we may see deaths hold steady or fall. I know, predicting “anything could happen” is not very bold, but I think there’s too much uncertainty for me — a non-epidemiologist — to be bolder than that.

All data is either directly from here or derived from data from here: Minnesota Department of Health: Situation Update for Covid-19 . I went into a little more detail on some of these data in my post Covid Isn’t Killing Minnesotans Like It “Should” a few weeks ago.

Reminder: I break these out between long-term care (LTC) and non-LTC residents where possible. Furthermore, I focus on non-LTC because most of the people reading this are not LTC residents, and most of my advice is not applicable to them.

In Minnesota, covid is slowing down. This is not true everywhere. If the virus gets opportunities and good luck or both, it may not remain true here. But, for right now, we are in a lull–hopefully one that continues for a while.

How can you, the average citizen, take advantage of this? I’ll lead with some math and then pivot to some practical suggestions based on the decisions I’ve been making.

Back in March, I suggested the following equation for deciding whether to attend a social function:

(1 – ( 1 – ( x / y ) ) ^ z ) * 100 = % chance of exposure

Where x = estimated number of actual cases in your nation/state/county/town (the more fine-grained the better)

y = the population of your nation/state/county/town, and

z = the number of people who would be at the gathering

So, back in March, I computed that, assuming there were 10 actual covid cases in Minnesota on March 11th (a substantial underestimate, it turned out; it was likely closer to 1,000 cases), the odds of one of us bringing covid to a 10-person family dinner in Minnesota was:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 10 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 10 ) * 100 = 0.0018%

I placed my personal “this-is-too-risky” threshold at 5-in-10,000 (0.05%) and so deemed the dinner an acceptable risk.

A lot has changed since March!

First, we have a much better idea of how many cases are circulating in Minnesota. Our testing is still not where it needs to be for full surveillance of the disease, but it’s not a complete joke anymore like it was in March. Test results still lag by a solid week, sometimes a bit more, but our positivity rate is at 3% and declining. Getting our positivity rate down to the “gold standard” of 2% will require a huge push (just as much of a push as reducing our positivity rate from 15% to 10% did, because that’s how percents work), plus a little luck, but we are heading in the right direction.

At a 3% positivity rate, it seems reasonable to assume that, for every two cases we detect, there’s–roughly–1 case we don’t detect. (Thanks again to Boise for providing some grounding data for this.) Maybe it’s 3 cases we don’t detect, maybe only half a case, but the point is we’re detecting a large proportion of them. We are no longer in the position we were in in April, when we were having long and very serious arguments about whether we were missing 90% of all cases, 95% of them, or 99%.

This means we can look at recent test results and get a fairly good idea of how many people are infected right now. We simply couldn’t do even a decent job of this until quite recently. We have to exclude the past week of data, because tests from the past 7 days are still mostly not processed, but take a look. Covid runs for about a month in most non-hospitalized people, infection to onset to recovery, so here’s the most recent month of data available today (June 21st):

(You will have to scroll to the right to see the entire table. It’s a big table. Fields marked with an asterisk are taken directly from state data; other figures are my own math based on state data.)

Sum up the last column and you get 61,528.5.

This suggests that there are around 60,000 active cases of covid in Minnesota outside long-term care residents. (LTC patients have their own epidemic going on, and a whole different set of risks to face.) Again, and I can’t say this enough times, that 60,000 figure could be well off in either direction, but we can be pretty sure the number’s more than, say, 20,000 and under 200,000.

But how many of those cases do we really need to consider an exposure risk?

If you’re going to, say, the grocery store or the mall, you kinda need to consider all of them. Some of these 60,000 people may be symptomatic but aren’t following stay-at-home rules, and you may bump into them in the grocery line. Some may think they’ve recovered (or have convinced themselves of that) but are still contagious (although how contagious is still an open question). Walk into a crowded building for a protest or rally or worship service, and you’re liable to be in the presence of some of these people. If you’re not careful, they’ll chant or sing or scream that virus right into your lungs.

If you’re in a shopping center with, say, 300 Minnesotans, the odds that one of them has it and will potentially expose you should be computed as:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 60,000 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 300 ) * 100 = 96%

Those are not friendly odds.

But what if you just want to see friends or family whom you haven’t seen in months due to social distancing? That changes the math. In that case, you should ask whether your friends or family have shown any symptoms, and whether they’ve been exposed to anyone who has. (You can’t do this with people at a shopping center.)

If you can be confident that nobody’s had symptoms or been around anyone with symptoms (and you’re confident that your friend isn’t lying or minimizing), then you don’t need to worry about all cases of covid in Minnesota at all stages of progression. You only need to consider the possibility that your friend has covid but is pre-symptomatic.

We now have a pretty clear idea that covid can be transmitted during the incubation period before you develop symptoms. But, while the overall incubation period can last two weeks, you’re only contagious for a maximum of 4 days before symptoms begin. (This well-circulated study says 3 days, but I saw one case — which I can’t find now — in a different study where the subject was contagious 4 days prior to symptoms. We’re going with the more cautious number.) We didn’t know this back in March.

We should also consider the very human tendency, even among honest people, to minimize symptoms during the first day or two when they develop.

What this means is that, rather than worrying about every single case of covid in the state right now — an entire month of cases! — for close social contacts who are verifiably non-symptomatic, we probably only need to worry about cases that are in the 6-day window where they are either contagious but pre-symptomatic, or early symptomatic.

That’s a much smaller number. As I write this, on Sunday, June 21st, I estimate that, outside long-term care facilities, there are 3,340.2 contagious Minnesotans who are pre-symptomatic or early-symptomatic. (In the table above, take the final column for the last six rows, add ’em up, and that’s what you get.) Maybe the true number of pre-symptomatics is half that, maybe double, but, however you slice it, it’s a lot less than 60,000 people. I’ll cautiously round 3,340 cases up to 4,000 to emphasize its imprecision.

So if I want to have my friend and his wife over after several months of social distancing (thinking of you here, P & K), and they both certify that they are non-symptomatic and haven’t been exposed to anyone who is symptomatic, then the odds that one of them brings covid into this house may be estimated as:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 4,000 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 2 ) * 100 = 0.14%

So the odds that my night with a friend will expose me and mine to covid is a little over 1 in 1,000. That’s not bad at all.

But there’s more good news.

Second, we now have a much better idea of how dangerous exposure is. Back in March, my analysis ended with the above exposure calculations. At the time, all we could do is compute the (rough) odds that you were in the same room as someone with covid. We had no idea what the odds were that, if you were exposed to covid, you would catch it. We had to assume, for safety, that the odds were close to 100%.

We now know that’s not even close to true.

For one thing, we now have high confidence that outdoor exposure, while not impossible, is extremely rare. We’ve suspected this since early April, I mentioned it in early May, and the lack of transmission at the Lake of the Ozarks Memorial Day parties reinforced it, but the Minneapolis George Floyd rallies are confirming it: we should be seeing big case spikes, especially among people who protested, but we aren’t. Those rallies were a petri dish for The Rona, featuring huge numbers of people (at least scores of whom were pre-symptomatic or early symptomatic), poor masking, horrible social distancing, chanting and singing and screaming, tear gas, mass arrests, jailing, and plenty of smoke from the fires, all of which promotes covid spread. There were probably some infections from the protests, but the numbers are small enough that we aren’t seeing it in statewide numbers, nor even in protester-specific testing. That seems like clinching proof: covid spreads very, very poorly outdoors, and apparently only through extended, unmasked, face-to-face close contact.

So even if my risk of exposure to covid at an outdoor gathering like a pool party is very high, my risk of actually developing covid from that exposure seems to be negligible.

For another thing, even indoors, covid transmission is not a sure thing.

You don’t want to be at a restaurant next to somebody who has it, especially if that person is sitting in front of an air vent blowing contaminated air your way. There’s plenty of horror stories in this article, covering everything from indoor beer festivals to family birthday parties, which suggests a lot about exactly how covid spreads in enclosed areas with lots of people. This quite recent article covers some of the same ground, but includes some new cases that weren’t available when the first was written, and it features more rigorous analysis. Bottom line: covid loves spreading around at events with lots of movement, mingling, hugging, and touching.

Covid also spreads very well at dinner tables, hitting something like 50% of people at a 5-10 person table over the course of an hour. A Wall Street Journal article that summarizes a lot of these studies (without actually linking to or naming them!, dang media) mentions evidence that better ventilation can help. This early study suggested a slightly lower dinner-table “attack rate,” at 35%, but exclude meals with more than 15 attendees and non-meals, and the attack rate rises to ~52%, right in line with what we’re seeing elsewhere. So open a window whenever you can and hope for the best!

On the other hand, when one person in a household develops covid, there seems to be only a ~20% chance (confidence interval 15-25%) that someone else in the same household will develop it. (Odds are higher for those older than 60.) That same study shows significantly lower spread if the sick person is immediately quarantined after infection. A second study largely agrees on all points, and also offers some interesting insights about spouses. Both studies also note that children are as much as 4 times less likely to catch covid from an exposure, which is useful! So, within households–by many measures, the closest contacts of all–there seems to be a surprisingly good chance of one person getting sick but not passing it on.

Meanwhile, there are extremely few reported cases of transmission through fleeting contact or from surfaces. You’re not going to catch covid from getting drive-through, or from visiting the megamall. If you stay in one area for a period of time, or spend more than a minute or two in direct face-to-face contact with someone (say, a salesperson), that will put you at risk. We do see shopping mall transmissions in the studies linked above, but they seem to depend on face-to-face interactions with salespeople.

So if I’m interested in having my two friends over to dinner, and they eat with just me, my odds of exposure are still:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 4,000 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 2 ) * 100 = 0.14%

But, even if exposed, my odds of infection at a dinner party are only around 50%, so my real odds of getting infected are:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 4,000 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 2 ) * 0.5 * 100 = 0.07%

These are not terrible odds.

Of course, if my wife and/or kids attend the same dinner, the math gets more complicated, because one of us is likely to catch it and that person may spread it to someone else in the house. You can’t forget about those kinds of dynamics when considering your chances.

Third, we have a much better idea of covid’s fatality risks. Back in March, we did not have a clear picture of who died from covid. We did have this 17 February study, which I used, but we already knew it was missing important information, especially from people who had developed only mild symptoms. It wasn’t clear how well the early study would hold up. We had to be cautious, and had to assume that infection meant a high risk of death — considerably higher than the 17 February study indicated. (I, for one, followed this solid rule of thumb: for any data coming out of communist China, use it… but confirm it against non-Chinese data as quickly as possible.)

As it turned out, though, the 17 February study held up pretty well. As far as I know, the Robert Verity infection fatality ratios by age group (last updated on May 2nd; see Table 1 on page 673) have been holding up nicely, and have been more confirmed than modified. The Verity estimates for CFR are right in line the CFR’s from the 17 February study, and its IFR estimates are about half that.

So we are now able to say certain things pretty confidently, like: even if I, a 31-year-old man in good health with no comorbidities, catch covid, my probability of dying is under 1 in 10,000.

On the other hand, hypothetically, if a 61-year-old woman with a chronic kidney condition caught covid, her fatality risk would be around 2% due to her age. But she is a woman, and men account for around two-thirds of covid deaths, so we adjust her fatality down to 1.3%. But the chronic kidney disease is bad news, roughly tripling, and plausibly octupling(!), her fatality risk. When one’s life is at stake, I tend to err on the side of caution, so I would put this hypothetical woman’s odds of death from covid at 1.3% * 8 = about 1 in 10.

That’s a pretty scary number — and it assumes that the hospitals have enough beds to take care of her, which they may not in a bad surge. That hypothetical lady really does not want to catch covid-19.

If you’re my age and healthy, this disease isn’t really something to be terribly worried about. It may be awful to catch, and there’s plenty of stories about how it was like the flu except it dragged on and on and on. I dread the idea of my wife having to take care of the kids by herself for weeks while we’re all quarantined from the world I’m stuck in the basement quarantined from them — but the odds I’ll actually die of covid, even after catching it, are similar to my odds of having a heart attack at 31.

Yet, even if you’re young and healthy, probably know at least a few older or higher-risk people, maybe family, maybe friends. If you are seeing them regularly, especially if you’re sharing a household with them, they’re the people you really need to protect.

So let’s go back to that dinner party. If I want to have my two friends over to have dinner with me alone, my odds of getting killed by that decision (because one of them has covid, I catch it, and I die) are:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 4,000 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 2 ) * 0.5 * 0.0001 * 100 = 0.000007%

These are lightning-strike numbers. I could even go to work (where I have close contacts with 6-7 people in a day, all of whom must daily certify they are non-symptomatic) without a great deal of personal risk:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 4,000 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 7 ) * 0.5 * 0.0001 * 100 = 0.00002%

My fear would be catching covid and then transmitting it on to my dad, a 63-year-old man with no comorbidities (fatality risk: ~2.5%) and whom I see on a very regular basis right now. Because I see him often, I should treat him as a household contact (transmission risk during presymptomatic period: ~15%). So the odds that my visit to work would kill him are much higher:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 4,000 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 7 ) * 0.5 * 0.15 * 0.025 * 100 = 0.0009%

…which still is not awful. I’ll continue working from home until that number is a lot smaller regardless.

But what if I were a 65-year-old man who went to, say, an indoor political rally with 6,000 people of uncertain symptomatic status and spent all night shouting “four more years,” then came home to my 67-year-old wife with chronic kidney disease? I might give my wife’s fatality odds as:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 60,000 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 6000 ) * 0.75 * 0.15 * 0.1 * 100 = 1.1%

And mine as:

(1 – ( 1 – ( 60,000 / 5600000 ) ) ^ 6000 ) * 0.75 * 0.025 * 100 = 1.9%

(My odds of infection here are 75%, hers 15% contingent on my being infected.)

This is a bad risk. Any time your odds of dying from a single interaction go above about one in a hundred thousand (the odds of dying in any given skydive)… don’t take it. This risk is a thousand times higher than that. Don’t go to big indoor political rallies right now! I have the right to tell you that, Trump supporters, even though the epidemiologists mostly don’t. (If the rallies are outdoors, then that’s a whole different story. I still wouldn’t do it, but the risks appear to be miniscule.)

Of course, you can’t boil pandemic risk down into a single simple equation, much as I would like to! It’s simple to compute your exposure and fatality threat from a single interaction, but the world is actually much messier than that.

For example, suppose you are high-risk, and your only close contacts are your grandchildren, whom you see twice a week. They see their other grandparents twice a week as well. One of the other grandparents has continued going to work, which is in a large, well-ventilated indoor area, and has about 30 close contacts per day, all of whom certify that they are non-symptomatic upon entering the work site. Meanwhile, one of your grandchildren has taken a part-time job at a fro-yo place, with only one other employee (her boss) but many fleeting contacts (the customers). What are your odds of contracting (and dying from) covid via your grandchildren over the next six months? And at what point are there enough cases in the state that you need to stop allowing your grandkids to visit?

This situation does not fit neatly into the equation we have developed. Transmission for children are different, the nature and risk of the contacts at this hypothetical workplaces are unclear, and, above all, the serial contact situation (where several people involved are in contact with the same non-household contacts over and over again instead of just once) makes the whole thing tricky. Our equation can offer guidance, but not answers.

Even if the equation gave you answers, it still would be up to you to determine what to do with them. I feel comfortable with a fatality risk of about 1-in-10,000. You might not… or you might be willing to tolerate far more risk.

And even if you felt comfortable with the risk, you’d need to remember that the equation is built on variables that are only estimates, and not even especially strong ones. There’s probably 4,000 or so presymptomatic cases in Minnesota right now, but it could actually be half that or twice that — and that’s not even official state data, so what if I’m wrong? Math helps make everything better, but in the fog-of-war of an ongoing epidemic, it can’t solve all our problems.

So what are you doing, James?

Last month, I told you that my personal rule was to enter close contact (>10 minutes of sustained, face-to-face contact) only with people who could name every node on their social graph — that is, everyone they’d been in contact with, everyone those people had been in contact with, everyone those other people had been in contact with, and so forth. If we knew everyone in that social network, then there was just no good way for the virus to “break in” and start infecting us.

For example, I’ve been spending time with my parents, because we all know that, other than routine and minimized shopping trips (and one trip to a hair salon), everyone in my house and everyone in their house has been isolated from the rest of the world. Practically speaking, none of us could be carrying covid because none of us have spent any time with somebody who could infect us!

This is now being called the “double bubble” strategy, and New Zealand is apparently taking credit for it, although I could have sworn I saw the same strategy discussed under a different name in Scandanavia in April (which is where I got the idea). The “double bubble” is a sensible stay-sane strategy for times when covid is raging out of control and you need to shelter for safety.

We in Minnesota are not in one of those times. We can now afford to be more flexible.

My household is sticking to the same basic model of minimizing outside contacts. We still aren’t going to Mass (we can see for ourselves on the weekly livestreams that most congregations are still singing! which seems unnecessarily risky). But we are sending the kids out to play on playgrounds regularly, and we intend to make use of any outdoor pools or zoos or splash pads that reopen this summer. More significantly, we aren’t holding all of our household contacts to quite the same rigid standard. We’re getting back in contact with people we really miss, even if they’re breaking isolation, as long as they’re doing it in a manageable and sensible way.

Let’s go back to my two dinner-party friends. If they went to an international Magic: the Gathering tournament right now (population: thousands; close contacts: dozens; covid statuses: unknown), then we’d cut them off cold until two weeks had passed. That’s a high risk and a stupid one (besides, all MtG events are cancelled), and we won’t put my parents in its line of fire.

But if one of my friends went to work twice a week, with proper masking and distancing, and could promise us that none of her co-workers were symptomatic… well, given where Minnesota’s at right now, that would be a pretty safe exception to make. We just need to be careful not to make too many exceptions, and only to make them for good reasons, because too many small exceptions adds up to large risk.

So, to sum up, here are some activities I personally consider too risky, not risky, and acceptably risky right now. Few of these are really risky for me, but they are risky for my parents, whom I see regularly… and it’s easier to stop some of these things than it is to stop seeing my parents.

Again, this is my own personal judgment. Your mileage may vary. If you are in part of the country where covid is on the upswing, your mileage should vary. If Minnesota’s cases start ticking up again, my mileage will vary.

But I hope, after all that inscrutable math, that it’s a useful illustration of where I think we are in this epidemic right now.

Stay safe! But let your hair down and enjoy the summer. It probably isn’t going to last, and you may as well safely recharge your batteries while you can.