Man, I wish I knew how to make a GIF

Or even how to embed an MP4 video into a DW entry. Oh, who am I kidding. At the moment I can't even upload a single image to F-ing Dreamwidth. Well, here's a link if you want to see something even cuter than cat videos.

Twins laughing ETA Jun 10. Laramie made me a GIF from this video, which I will now attempt to post here.

I think we've turned the corner

I don't entirely understand why, and with the combination of protests and "re-openings" I suppose we may turn back the other way, but the Minnesota stats for the past week are just what you want to see at this point. Most importantly (IMHO) the number currently hospitalized for COVID peaked on May 28 at 606 and has done nothing but decline since. The number currently in ICU has declined proportionately (198 today), so this does not suggest that the criteria for hospital discharge has changed substantially. Rate of arrival of new cases is clearly declining also, although it varies so much from day to day that you have to zoom way out to see the trend. Daily new cases peaked May 18-21 at about 965. Now we're seeing roughly half that.

Over the same period, our rate of testing kept going up but the percent of tests returned positive went steadily down (which is important for some reason, but I'm not sure I grasp why). That percentage had been 10-11%, is now down to 8%. One of the criteria for re-opening is for that number to be below 10%

See for yourselves, if you're interested.