Monday numbers are out (COVID in Minnesota)

[dreamshark]

Daily case count (averaged over 7 days) has plummeted another 45% to 2,324. We're now down to slightly below where we were at Christmas, just before the sudden Omicron surge started. Our graph looks much like everybody else's Omicron graph (4 weeks up, 4 weeks down) except that we were still on the Delta downslope when our Omicron peak started upwards. 

Comments

[quadong]

Ok, I'm confused about something. The number of COVID patients in MN ICUs is down to about a quarter of what it was at the peak. Yet

https://mn.gov/covid19/data/response-prep/response-capacity.jsp

shows single-digit percentage ICU availability. I mean, I can see that even at peak-COVID, most ICU usage wasn't for COVID, but shouldn't things have improved at least a little bit? Or do they just take away staffing as fast as patients drain out of the system, and if so, are those maps just always going to show red for the Cities? I still can't tell if the crisis is over or not.

[dreamshark]

I think Minnesota manages its ICU beds differently than most states, deliberately running at an availability rate of less than 10% all the time. They seem to have the ability to convert rooms back and forth between ICU and regular hospital beds very quickly as needed. Which may be the most efficient way to manage resources, but it sure is confusing when you're trying to use that as a metric.

[quadong]

But the non-ICU beds are also sitting at single-digit percentages. What should I make of that?

[dreamshark]

I don't know. But if they never tell us what the "normal" availability percentage is, it's difficult to know what the numbers mean.

[minnehaha]

I'm most interested in the NYT "cases per 100,000" metric on the "Hot Spots" map. More and more counties are showing "no reported cases," or fewer than 10 per 100,000. Nebraska looks especially healthy by that measure.

Rock County MN leads the local situation, with 15 per 100,000.

K.