Year-Over-Year Charts, February 18

Look especially at the case chart, look at the symmetry up and down.  Now tell me how any intervention had any effect on that curve.  Notice also the difference between the curves for ICU and non-ICU hospitalizations.  The difference is incidental hosps, which are much less likely in the ICU.   Dave’s notes:

1. For this version of the yearly comparison charts the date axis is formatted to display from July 1 to June 30, for 20220-2021 and 2021-2022. Data before July 1, 2020 is not shown.
2. For all charts the last 7 days of data is excluded to avoid charting incomplete data. For the deaths chart data from the last 14 days is excluded.
3. 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.
4. All data is shown as 7 day running averages.
5. Fig. 1: Average tests per day continue to drop sharply, now approaching testing levels seen at this time last year, as Minnesota was exiting the Winter 2020-2021 surge in cases.
6. Fig. 2: New daily cases per day continue to drop sharply, and are now at levels last seen in September of last year. However, the reporting of the backlog of cases by MDH continues to be a problem. This week, from 2/14/22 to 2/18/22, MDH has reported a total of 16,425 new PCR and antigen cases. Of these, 1,862 PCR cases and 1,111 antigen cases had specimen collection dates prior to Feb. 1, for a total of 2,973 cases, 18% of the weekly reported cases. These cases were therefore a minimum of 13 days to 17 days old by the time they were reported. These old cases have moved the peak in cases from Jan. 10 to Jan. 11 (and nearly to Jan. 12), on a 7 day moving average basis. MDH stopped reporting on the backlog of cases last week, but it obviously has not been completely resolved.
7. Fig. 3: Active cases dropping sharply, lagging slightly behind new daily cases per day. Active cases are still slightly above the level at the start of the Omicron surge, but as we have discussed before, there is a sense that the calculated active cases are higher than the actual number of infectious people, based on the recent change to a 5 day quarantine criteria by the CDC.
8. Fig. 4: ICU admissions per day have finally taken a step lower. However, it is possible that reporting lags are contributing to the reduction in admissions, despite excluding the last 7 days of data. It remains interesting that ICU admissions did not react at all to the Omicron surge in cases.
9. Fig. 5: Non-ICU admissions per day have finally fallen below the level of admissions at the start of the Omicron surge. We can see however, that although there was an increase in Non-ICU admissions corresponding with Omicron, it is much lower than the proportional increase in cases.
10. Fig. 6: ICU Covid hospital beds in use continuing to fall. Note that the relative decrease in ICU beds in use is greater than the decrease in daily admissions. This suggests that the average length of stay in ICU is becoming shorter in recent weeks.
11. Fig. 7: Non-ICU Covid hospital beds in use are falling, but still appear relatively elevated compared to the drop in new cases per day. This suggests that average length of stay for Non-ICU beds is still elevated as we have speculated several times in recent months.
12. Fig. 8: Deaths attributed to Covid continue to drift generally lower, and still show no apparent change in trend due to the Omicron surge in cases. Although we exclude 14 days of data, the longer lag in reporting deaths might be contributing to the steep decline in the last week.