Minnesota shifts daily COVID stats report to weekly schedule

Christopher Magan, Pioneer Press
·3 min read

Nearly 28 months after the coronavirus arrived in Minnesota, state health officials announced Tuesday they will stop reporting daily statistics on the pandemic.

Starting Thursday, the state will release only a weekly update with the latest numbers of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths, as well as vaccination rates and other measures.

Health officials also are revamping how the data is presented with a new website that should make it easier to find and understand measures of the outbreak.

Kathy Como-Sabetti, a state epidemiologist, said weekly trends do a better job of conveying risk in particular regions of the state than do single days of data.

“One day’s data does not make a trend,” she said. “At this point in time, decision making should be about where we are in the course of a week or two.”

Andrea Ahneman, a health department spokeswoman, said the changes align with how officials report on other infectious disease outbreaks, such as measles or influenza. She noted the department may return to a daily reporting schedule if pandemic conditions worsen.

Minnesota has been reporting COVID-19 outbreak statistics regularly since March 2020. Initially, they were reported every day, but the department stopped its weekend updates last summer.

The types of data made available have changed from time to time. For instance, the state no longer reports test-positivity rates because so many people now use at-home tests whose results are not recorded by the state.

8 NEW DEATHS

The 3,362 new infections reported Tuesday, which cover this past weekend, pushed the cumulative total of coronavirus infections above 1.55 million since the outbreak began. But simple case counts don’t provide the same detail about the pandemic that they once did.

Instead, state officials rely on case rates, which now stand around 24 new infections per 100,000 residents per week. That is down from previous weeks but well above the health department’s high-risk threshold.

In contrast, the weekly per capita rate for hospitalizations recently dropped below the state’s high-risk threshold to around 7.4 new admissions per 100,000 residents. There are 379 patients currently hospitalized with COVID-19, including 29 in intensive care.

The rate of deaths continues to fluctuate, currently standing around six per day over the last week. There were eight more deaths reported Tuesday for a total of 12,792 since the pandemic began.

Health officials use all those measures when determining guidelines for controlling the spread of the coronavirus. They also increasingly rely on the presence of coronavirus genetic material in sewage.

On Friday, the Metropolitan Council reported a slight uptick in coronavirus genetic material in Twin Cities wastewater. Nearly all of it was the highly-contagious omicron variant or its various relative strains.

Finally, state health officials will continue to monitor vaccination rates and encourage everyone to get their initial shots and recommended boosters. Young children just became eligible for vaccination, and about 68 percent of the state’s total population has completed at least their initial series of shots.

However, the state also announced Tuesday that some of its vaccine outreach efforts are ending this week. The health department no longer is scheduling community vaccination events requested by the public, and the Metro Transit vaccination bus will stop running Thursday.

The department said with respect to vaccination that it’s “transitioning toward a more sustainable model of working in the community.”

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