Dave’s weekly update, you can see testing and cases are at highs, hosps and deaths are not. So much immunity in the population and maybe a little of Omicron being milder. Note that the usual 7 day delay on what is included probably isn’t long enough given the current DOH processing issues. Dave’s notes:
1. For all charts the last 7 days of data is excluded to avoid charting incomplete data. Deaths reporting however is likely to be incomplete.
2. All data is taken from the Minnesota Department of Health Situation Update for OCVID-19 web page https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/situation.html and from the Response and Preparation web page https://mn.gov/covid19/data/response-prep/response-capacity.jsp.
3. Fig. 1: Average tests per day appear to have peaked on 1/13/2022 at 64,790 tests per day.
4. Fig. 2: New daily cases appear to have peaked 15,524 cases per day on 1/10/2022.
5. Fig. 3: Active cases continue to rise, as of 1/14/2022, the last day plotted.
6. Fig. 4: ICU Covid admissions per day continue to hold steady between 15 and 20 admissions per day, despite the rise in positive cases.
7. Fig. 5: Non-ICU Covid hospital admissions per day had a near-term high at 195 admissions per day, on 1/14/2022.
8. Fig. 6: ICU Covid hospital beds in use continuing to fall.
9. Fig. 7: Non-ICU Covid hospital beds in use continue to rise, reaching 1882 beds in use on 1/14/2022
10. Fig. 8: Deaths attributed to Covid are declining.
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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With covid vaccines being very effective against death and hospitalization, why don’t the charts reflect a 50% to 75% reduction in deaths and hospitalization from 2021? In MN we have a 50% plus vaccination rate, plus nearly 2 years of natural immunity, and a large loss of the most vulnerable in 2020. One would think that deaths from covid would be limited to a very small subset of individuals who remain unvaxinated with multiple comorbidities. Yet it appears that deaths are trending only slightly lower than last year when very few were vaccinated
My admittedly non-expert opinion is that 1) Delta produced worse symptoms and was more lethal than the prior variations which drove the spike in July and August 2021, and 2) Omicron is much more infectious so that even if it generally produces milder symptoms the sheer number of infections, especially breakthroughs, is keeping the percentages higher.