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.