Dave put together another way to look at the burden of cases among groups, based on a new data file received from DOH. The base is the unvaccinated, the next layers are breakthroughs and reinfections. We do not know overlap between breakthroughs and reinfections, but they exist. We also don’t know how many undetected infections there are, which could increase number of reinfections, but decrease or increase the rate, and could do the same for breakthroughs. State has the data, won’t give it, but at least they gave us a little more detail. Until we get all the data, sure looks like a whole lot more breakthroughs than reinfections. Dave’s notes:
1. In response to a Data Practices Act request the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) on 1/14/2022 provided us a database of Covid breakthrough infections, with all breakthrough cases listed by date, along with age of person, whether or not hospitalized, and whether or not deceased. In total there are 162,831 breakthrough cases listed, which is the current total breakthrough cases published on the MDH COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Weekly Report https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/stats/vbt.html.
MDH has requested that I stop asking for weekly updates of the vaccine breakthrough data, and that I should ask for updates monthly instead. I have taken this request as a promise to provide monthly updates. We will see if this is a correct interpretation.
2. On the following charts the data field “Daily Unvaccinated Initial Cases” is determined by subtracting the daily breakthrough cases and daily reinfections for the total daily cases. Breakthrough cases and Reinfections are obtained from the Minnesota Situation Update for COVID-19 https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/situation.html.
3. It is unknown how complete the reporting on breakthrough cases is. We have chosen not to display the last 2 weeks of data, ending the charts on 12/31/2021. Since the data for cases and reinfections are published every week day we know that reporting for cases and reinfections are substantially complete in 2 weeks. It is possible that reporting for breakthrough cases lags more than 2 weeks, but without more frequent data sets it impossible for us to know how complete the reporting is.
4. We can see visually that breakthrough cases and reinfection cases appear to be an increasing proportion of total cases Now that we have more detailed breakthrough data, more analysis can be contemplated.
The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements through Roche Consulting, LLC and may be reached at 
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Thanks Dave and Kevin, this is a very helpful view!
I’ve recently become aware of the idea of using nasal/oral rinses. A search of “covid nasal rinse” gets many hits. For example…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8026810/
Have you done any research on this?
Thanks.
Those charts oddly seem to show the lines are almost parallel.
I think that is an artifact of screwed up DOH processing, we kind of seem to have plateaued a few weeks ago on proportion of events, but it could also be a booster effect. A lot of Minnesotans are boosted. But when we see data from mid-December to now, we will see that proportion go up because all I hear about is vaxed and boosted people getting infected.
I’m sorry but you don’t have the data to determine any of this … you simply don’t know the number of infections … full stop … you don’t have a good numerator nor a perfect denominator …
actually there is no reason to think that the relative trend between subgroups is wrong–no reason to think that the undetected infections vary substantially between groups.