 | | Capitol View | | | COVID in Minnesota TODAY | |
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| This is a title | | | 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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Three things to know
| | - Cases connected to schools are rising sharply, but some of this is an artifact of definitions rather than reflecting an explosive rise in new infections
- Cases among children are up, but some of this may be explained by rising tests
- There are some signs Minnesota's outbreak may have plateaued, though hospitalizations continue to rise
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| This is a title | | Let's start with what most of you probably are most interested in: cases in schools.
Minnesota is definitely seeing more cases tied to schools — as you would expect to some degree when you bring a bunch of people together, many unvaccinated, while an infectious disease is spreading.
But exactly how many more cases? That's harder to sort out.
Here's a chart showing the number of cases tied to schools, by week. | |
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| This is a title | | But this graph can be misleading. These are cases where the student or staff member was infectious while attending school. So it dropped to near zero over the summer not because no kids were getting sick, but because the ones who did get sick weren't attending school.
You might also note a big spike last spring starting around February. That's about two months before Minnesota's statewide wave kicked off in late March, and at a time when cases were actually falling statewide.
But it does happen to line up exactly with when large numbers of Minnesota students started studying in-person again. | |
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| This is a title | | Common sense dictates that any time susceptible people gather together with an infectious disease in the population, you've got the chance for more infections. But "more cases in schools" doesn't necessarily mean "more cases overall" — as happened last February and March, cases can decline statewide while spreading in schools.
Here's that earlier graph of school-related cases, but as a share of total statewide cases. Right now students and teachers who are doing in-person school represent about 6 percent of confirmed cases statewide. That's about half the level this peaked at this spring. | |
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| This is a title | | Also remember that the big plunge in school-related cases starting in late May doesn't necessarily mean fewer students and teachers getting sick, it just means they weren't attending in-person school to show up in this metric.
But this isn't the only way we can look at cases in school. We also get data on cases by age.
This shows us that right now Minnesotans aged 10 to 19 are reporting more cases per capita than any other group, with children under 10 not too far behind. | |
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| This is a title | | | This is, it's important to note, not the norm for the pandemic so far. For most of the time for which we have data, confirmed cases have been most prevalent among working-age adults, followed by teenagers, then older people and then children under 10. | |
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This is a title
| | | If you look at the change in per-capita cases since the start of September, right before most students returned to school, the data is even starker: Cases are up dramatically more among people under 20 than any other age bracket. | |
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This is a title
| | That in itself seems pretty scary. Cases tied to schools are up, and so are cases among people under 20. But I've got to throw another complication at you.
One of the striking factors about the past weeks — months, really — of COVID-19 in Minnesota is a steady surge in the number of tests people are taking. | |
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This is a title
| | And as we all know by now — though there can be a bit of a chicken-and-egg relationship between testing volume and cases — when you test more people, you tend to find a higher share of infections.
That's why we use positivity rate to control for testing volume and see whether cases are growing more quickly than tests.
So is this rise in cases among children just an artifact of expanded testing? Unfortunately, the answer to that is no.
It took some doing, but I was able to liberate data on testing volume by age from the PDF the Minnesota Department of Health had posted it in and thus calculate positivity rating by age. Here we can see that kids 10-19 do in fact have the highest positivity rate in the state, with children under 10 in second place. | |
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This is a title
| | So the high rate of cases we're seeing among children isn't a fluke of testing. It's real.
But also note that the big increase in positivity rate among children happened in July and August. During September these groups' positivity rate has been more-or-less flat!
What do we take away from this confusing mess of data? My first instinct is to say that while disease prevalence is pretty high right now among Minnesota's youth, there aren't any real signs of acceleration in these age groups.
In other words, while certainly some kids have gotten sick attending school who wouldn't have, there's not a ton of evidence yet for the idea that school is fueling a new wave of infections that wasn't happening. Instead, families are being more vigilant about testing now and are catching some mild infections that might have gone unnoticed before.
Pediatric infections do seem to have risen over the summer at the same time infections went up in almost every group — more than other groups, in fact, as one might expect given that everyone under 12, as well as many teenagers, are unvaccinated against COVID-19. | |
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So when will we peak?
| | | You might also have noticed above that just about every age group had a flat positivity rate over the last few weeks. That is in fact what we see when we look at statewide data — positivity rate flattened out several weeks ago and has been plateauing (with some minor ups and downs) ever since. | |
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So when will we peak?
| | | That flatness has happened even though cases keep on rising. | |
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So when will we peak?
| | This combination of data suggests that our outbreak may have plateaued, regardless of whatever's happening in schools.
Against that conclusion is Minnesota's COVID-19 hospitalization rate, which continues to climb. | |
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So when will we peak?
| | I don't have a great explanation for this divergence. Maybe hospitalizations, as a lagging indicator, are just trailing. Maybe testing volume has reached a level of saturation vis-à-vis the virus, such that expanded testing is finding mostly negatives. Maybe the question of who is getting sick — aside from the rising share of children, who are less likely to have serious symptoms — has been shifting to more vulnerable populations.
All I can do at this point is keep watching and digging and hope a pattern becomes clear! (And that it's a good pattern!)
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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| Deaths still rising | | | As of today's report, Minnesota crossed back over the 10 deaths per day threshold we had been under for nearly five months. We're near to matching the peak death rate from the spring 2021 wave and likely have further yet to rise given that cases haven't peaked yet. | |
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Deaths still falling
| | | These new deaths are almost entirely among people who don't live in nursing homes, by the way. | |
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Cases surge among Native Americans
| | While most metrics for the state of Minnesota's outbreak right now show either a plateau or modest increases, there is one group recording explosive growth: Native Americans.
New cases per capita among Native Americans have doubled over the past two weeks. The disease is more than twice as prevalent among this group than any other tracked racial/ethnic group in Minnesota. | |
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COVID hospitalizations continue to fall
| | The state's publicly released data unfortunately doesn't let us dive deeper to see if this outbreak is concentrated in particular geographic regions or age groups, but MPR News reporters are diving into this topic as we speak.
Native Americans are, I will note, the racial/ethnic group with the lowest recorded vaccination rate in Minnesota. | |
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What's happening next?
| | I'll keep following developments in schools and statewide!
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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