REGIONAL- The COVID news is good for the North Country this week, as a declining number of hospitalizations has caused the Centers for Disease Control to lower the region’s COVID activity level from medium to low.
The CDC-designated health service area that includes St. Louis, Carlton, Cook, Itasca, Koochiching, Lake, and Pine counties had been one of the few remaining areas in the state with elevated levels of COVID activity in recent weeks, but hospital admissions dropped by almost 45 percent last week, taking the rate per 100,000 people down to 7.1, solidly below the 10 per 100,000 benchmark for the elevated CDC category. The northeast region remains well above the last hard statewide data reported by the Minnesota Department of Health on Jan. 8, which was 1.32 per 100,000.
That’s in line with overall declines posted for the state and the nation last week, and better than the national rate of 8.01 hospitalizations per 100,000.
Another measure in northeast Minnesota that had bucked the statewide trend was the level of the COVID virus in wastewater, but it finally fell in line last week, declining by 19.2 percent.
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, noted the downward COVID trend in a podcast last Thursday.
“I do feel quite confident that we have, in fact, reached a recent peak in activity and are now starting to see declines,” Osterholm said. “There is still a lot of COVID transmission in our communities. I actually had a physician this past week that informed me that he lived on COVID Avenue, based on how many people in his neighborhood were currently affected. The good news is that while we are seeing lots of cases, the number is starting to drop.”
One statistic that hasn’t seen a decline is the number of deaths attributed to COVID, Osterholm said.
“Deaths have continued to increase in the U.S., approaching nearly 1800 a week towards the end of December, more than 250 deaths a day. Because of the delays involved in obtaining death data, it could still take several weeks to see some apparent declines matching up with the declines in cases as of now.”
Osterholm contrasted the death toll and vaccination rates for COVID against those for influenza.
“If you look at COVID, it is killing Americans at a rate almost three times higher than influenza,” he said. “Yet we’ve seen influenza vaccine coverage this season approaching almost 50 percent among children and adults, while uptake of the latest dose for COVID sits at roughly eight percent in children and 21 percent in adults. So clearly, we have a significant challenge here.”
MDH data clearly shows that the 65 and older segment of the population is bearing the brunt of the winter COVID surge. Hospitalization rates for this group were at a staggering 97.06 per 100,000 on Jan. 7, more than ten times higher than the overall statewide rate of 9.47, and those over 85 were far and away the most likely in that age group to die from COVID.
Native Americans had the highest hospitalization rates of any ethnic group throughout the month of December, although in early January the rate came down to about the same as Blacks, at about 11 per 100,000.
No tripledemic
Osterholm also took time in his podcast to dispute the suggestion made in many media circles that the country has been experiencing a triple epidemic of COVID, influenza, and RSV. While health officials have repeatedly talked about the challenges of all three illnesses being active at the same time and the potential impact on the health care system, the data simply doesn’t support the notion of a tripledemic.
“A triple epidemic means that we’re seeing all three of the viruses at epidemic levels, and that just hasn’t happened,” Osterholm said. “RSV and influenza cases and deaths have been well within the range we’d expect them to be at this point in the respiratory virus season. In Minnesota, influenza activity has remained at the minimal level throughout the entire influenza season – we are the only state that has experienced this very, very quiet flu season. This has ultimately been a very average flu season in terms of the amount of activity and mortality we’ve seen.”