| Welcome back to COVID in Minnesota TODAY, an email newsletter from MPR News about understanding the latest developments in Minnesota's COVID-19 outbreak. | | |
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Minnesota's COVID-19 wave has continued to get worse over the past week, with rising cases and hospitalizations. Still, in comparison to some other places, our outbreak hasn't been that bad.
The $64,000 question right now is, what can we take away from this state of affairs?
If there's one lesson I've taken away from following COVID-19 stats over the past year and a half, it's that if one place seems like it's escaping a nearby pandemic, wait a while before declaring victory. Many times, the virus eventually spreads to the place that had seemed unscathed. Not always, though! Which is why epistemological caution is always my watchword, especially when cases are on the rise.
Today, I'm going to try to sort through what's happening and what that can and can't tell us about what might happen next. |
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Three things to know
| - Minnesota's outbreak is getting worse, but much less steeply than in hard-hit southern states
- Our recent rise in cases appears more significant than the modest bump we saw last summer
- We don't know yet whether Minnesota is in for a serious wave, a mild wave or no wave at all
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| Right now Minnesota is averaging 430 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases per day. That compares to 250 per day last Thursday (July 22) and 162 per day two weeks ago. | | |
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| Our positivity rate is up to 3.4 percent, more than double the 1.5 percent we saw two weeks ago. And hospitalizations are up to around 29 per day, from 19 per day two weeks prior. | | |
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| To put all this in context, last week I shared the below chart, which lined up the changing positivity rate from each of the last four waves. As you can see here, the current wave not only started from the lowest starting point, it also has so far not risen at the steep rates we saw last year. (Earlier this week we saw some steeper increases, but it's unclear so far whether those were durable or temporary.) |
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| These increases are also quite small compared to what many other states are seeing and to what some foreign countries saw when they were hit by the delta variant. Here's the percent change in cases per capita for every U.S. state; as you can see, Minnesota's increases so far are on the low side and aren't even in the same ballpark as the hardest-hit states. |
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| If you map this out, you can see some very clear geographic patterns. The states being ravaged by COVID-19 right now are in the South, plus California and Nevada. | | |
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The big question now: Is this a regional outbreak focused on warm-weather states or the initial stages of a national outbreak? While many of these hard-hit states have low vaccination rates, California's vaccination rate is pretty similar to Minnesota's, so you can't just attribute this surge to low immunity.
One thing to remember is what happened last summer. After the initial spring wave that hit Minnesota and many other states, a new summer wave hit the South and some western states. You can see that in the below chart — many southern and western states had a bump in the summer of 2020 that the Midwest and Northeast didn't. |
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Now we have something of the same situation happening — cases are spiking in the South and (to a lesser degree) the West, but mostly not in the Midwest and Northeast.
And remember that last summer Minnesota did see cases bounce back in the summer — just not to the level of a wave. Cases rose, then plateauted, bouncing up and down with a positivity rate between 4 and 5 percent for most of the summer, until the fall wave hit. |
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So is that what's happening right now? A sort of minor bounceback — or a "dead cat bounce" — like last summer, but not an incipient wave?
It's entirely possible! But don't trust anyone who tells you this with certainty. The two situations certainly have their similarities, but they're not identical. Here's the change in positivity rates last summer and this summer. |
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Even setting aside the fact that summer 2021 started at a lower level than summer 2020 did, we can see that the increase in positivity this year is both larger in magnitude and longer in duration than what we saw last year.
The difference is even more striking when we look just at the percent changes since each year's late-June lows. The increase in COVID-19 positivity rate this year dwarfs what we saw last summer (though note that this presentation can exaggerate the change, since we're increasing from a lower base). |
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This leaves us with three possibilities here:
- Minnesota is in the early stages of a significant COVID-19 wave, similar to what southern states are experiencing right now. We can expect big increases in case counts in days to come.
- Minnesota is in the middle of a COVID-19 wave, but our higher levels of vaccinations compared to the past means it will end up being relatively mild, with lower case counts than any of the three prior waves.
- Minnesota is just seeing a brief uptick in cases that's coincidentally overlapping with regional waves elsewhere in the country. A wave is the wrong metaphor, and we shouldn't expect to see similar patterns from our three prior waves.
All three of these are possible! If I had to guess, I'd say my money's on No. 2, but that's just a guess — I can't predict the future.
That said, there are some things we can be reasonably confident about. Whatever happens with cases, we should expect hospitalizations and deaths to peak at much lower levels than they did in 2020 waves. That's because COVID-19 is much more likely to cause serious health complications for older individuals, and 90 percent of older Minnesotans are fully vaccinated right now, along with significant (though diminishing) shares of younger age groups. |
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We already saw this with the spring 2021 wave, which ended up causing fewer infections, fewer hospitalizations and fewer deaths than past waves.
Right now we have the added complications of the delta variant's increased contagiousness, weighted against the fact that around 52 percent of Minnesotans were fully vaccinated when cases started to rise on July 1, compared to 19 percent back on April 1 when the third wave kicked off.
If vaccinations were the only factor, you'd expect this fourth wave (if it indeed is one) to be even milder than the third wave (as indeed it has been to date). The delta variant could change that in the future, but so far there's no sign of that in Minnesota's data alone. In any case, I'm pretty confident in asserting that whether or not this wave is milder than the spring 2021 wave, it will definitely be milder than the 2020 waves, when no one was vaccinated.
I want to close by getting philosophical. The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume — stick with me here — posited what has become known as "Hume's guillotine." That's a sharp distinction between what is the case and what ought to be the case. Hume wrote in 1739 of reading certain moral arguments, when "of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence."
Hume was primarily concerned with people deriving "ought" from "is" (the so-called "naturalistic fallacy"). But today I'd argue the bigger "is" is people going the opposite way, trying to derive what is based on what ought.
We see that all over with COVID-19 stats, where people have very strong opinions about the best policies that the state ought to take (or not take) in response to the virus. And it's funny how many people's analysis of what is happening seem to line up with their views on COVID-19 mitigation policies. People who support vigorous masking mandates and shutdowns seem to be sure we're headed for a viral tsunami, while people who oppose them are sure what we're seeing is nothing at all.
I've tried in my analysis to remain entirely focused on the is side of things. I've shared data on how the outbreak is going, but you've never seen me take that next step and say, "Therefore we should/should not have a mask mandate" (or even "Therefore you should/should not personally wear masks"). That's an ought statement, which I avoid.
The rest of you aren't subject to that self-imposed rule, and are free — even encouraged! — to form opinions about what should be done based on the data and analysis I share with you. The trick is to not reason backwards: to filter which facts you accept based on whether they reinforce your police preferences. Hating mask mandates is no reason to dismiss signs of rising cases, because if accepted as true, that could lead to mask mandates, just as believing masking is essential is no reason to downplay any evidence that cases are going down because that could weaken support for masking.
Personally, I try to apply a rule to be more skeptical of information that reinforces something I want to be true. We're naturally skeptical of things that challenge what we believe but can be too credulous of things that reinforce our biases. So even if we are more likely to be correct than average (and I am happy to assume that each of you is in that fortunate situation), it's a helpful check to force ourselves to think twice before letting our biases get reinforced.
We may be in for a rough wave, a mild wave or no wave at all. But the likelihood of each outcome is not affected in the slightest by your political preferences. |
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Below, I'll explore a few more stats about Minnesota's COVID-19 outbreak. If you want to learn more, I also recommend these other articles:
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| Where cases are rising most | | As with past updates, COVID-19 cases are rising everywhere, but especially in the Twin Cities metro and east-central Minnesota. | |
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| This is even more dramatic if you adjust, as I did last week, for vaccination rates. By this measure, Hennepin and Ramsey counties are seeing around 30 new cases per day per unvaccinated resident. That's about half of where the spring 2021 wave peaked, and one-third of the fall 2020 wave. | |
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Slight uptick in vaccination rates
| Last week, I noted how Minnesota's vaccination rate had risen to around 3,000 per day, from a low of 2,000 per day.
That uptick in new shots has continued as news of the delta variant has spread. Now Minnesota's vaccination rate is up to about 4,000 per day. |
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| That's still, of course, an order of magnitude below the April peak. But it's the first time in a very long time that this metric has been moving upward. | | |
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What's happening next?
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Last week I said I would delve deeper into how this pandemic wave is impacting Black communities in Minnesota this week. Unfortunately, that prediction was based on an over-optimistic assessment of when the health department would fulfill a weeks-old data request. So maybe next time?
Thanks for subscribing to this newsletter and for all of you who've sent me your feedback. As always, if you like this newsletter, please share it and the sign-up link with others who you think might enjoy it.
— David |
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