Breakthrough Event Table, December 20

Over 10,000 new breakthru cases reported in the last week, 45% of all cases.  I would strongly to use date of event, not date of report, but the state stubbornly refuses to release that, so that is all we can use.  Can’t really compute case rates adequately either.  Sick of the hiding of relevant data.  And note the important point in number 5 below, the totals can change from prior weeks mostly involving shifting from the unvaxed bucket to the vaxed one.  So we are still grappling with how good the data is.  And the fact that prior weeks’ totals get changed makes us wonder if this is a mix of date of event and date of report.  We are thinking about that.

Dave’s notes:

1. The table and chart are updated for new data released by MDH on 12/20/2021, adding week starting 11/14/2021. The source is the data file https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/stats/vbtcounts.xlsx found on MDH web page https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/stats/vbt.html.
The data provided in the data file vbtcounts.xlsx is used without modification, other than to sum the weekly events and compute the breakthrough proportion. Vbtcounts.xlsx provides breakthrough and non-breakthrough cases, hospital admissions, and deaths for each week listed.

2. MDH defines a breakthrough event as a Covid case, hospital admission, or death that occurs 14 or more days after completing the vaccination shots (not including boosters).

3.  The data published by MDH in this data file contains cases for those 12 and over only. Including cases for those under 12 would tend to decrease the breakthrough proportions somewhat for cases, but almost not all for hospital admissions (because there are so few admissions for those under 12), and even less for deaths.

4.  There were 10,823 breakthrough cases for the week starting 11/14/2021, another new high, and the proportion of breakthrough cases was 44.9%, also a new high. Breakthrough hospital admissions were lower at 334 for the week, 29.7% of total admissions. The breakthrough deaths were also lower for the week ,with 58 deaths, 34.1% of the weekly reported total.

5.  In this data release there were minor revisions to the last 5 weeks of data. For cases and hospital admissions there were small reduction in the unvaccinated totals and additions to the vaccinated totals. For example, the original cases for the week starting 11/7/21 were 10,464 fully vaccinated, and 13,120 not fully vaccinated. In the newer data release on 12/20/21 these totals were revised to 10,482 fully vaccinated and 13,115 not fully vaccinated. Similar but smaller revisions occurred in the hospital admission data. Deaths were more generally revised. For example, the original data for deaths the week starting 11/7/21 was 74 fully vaccinated and 94 not fully vaccinated. In the 12/20/21 data there now report 83 fully vaccinated and 112 not fully vaccinated.