REGIONAL- Summer is here, COVID-19 restriction mandates are gone, and so, too, it appears, is the vigor that only three months ago prompted a record-high 413,000 doses of COVID vaccines administered in a single week in Minnesota.
Last week’s total of 35,378 doses was the second lowest since vaccines began to be distributed to specific priority groups in mid-December. The peak number, reached in the first week of April, came as vaccinations were opened to anyone 16-years-old and over and has been on a steady decline ever since.
The needle on the state’s vaccination dashboard indicating the percentage of Minnesotans over 16 who have had at least one dose of vaccine barely budged over the past month.
State officials were in full swing promoting their “Your Shot to Summer” vaccine rewards campaign on June 5 as the needle sat at 64.9 percent. One month later, that campaign is over, and as of Tuesday the number had risen to just 67.2 percent.
Unequal interest
Signs were already apparent in early June that some areas of the state were more readily embracing vaccinations than others. Minnesota Public Radio reported on June 5 that while the Twin Cities metropolitan area had already reached the 70-percent goal, outside of that region only 57 percent of Minnesotans had been vaccinated once, and the pace of vaccinations has slowed since then.
In 14 counties, fewer than 40 percent of residents have been fully vaccinated. Todd County, northwest of St. Cloud, is the lowest with a fully-vaccinated rate of 29.3 percent. By contrast, Cook County, in northeastern Minnesota, has the highest percentage of fully-vaccinated people at 69.8 percent.
And fully-vaccinated people aren’t the ones who are still getting COVID-19, according to Minnesota Department of Health data.
“We can confidently say that the vast majority of cases, hospitalizations and deaths occurring in Minnesota are in unvaccinated people,” said MDH Information Officer Doug Schultz in a July 2 email to the Timberjay. “We track breakthrough cases very closely. Those are cases that occur in people who are fully-vaccinated. Out of 2,771,183 fully vaccinated Minnesotans as of May 30, we had a cumulative total (since Dec. 1) of 3,080 breakthrough cases with 333 hospitalizations and 46 deaths. That equates to 1.1 percent of vaccinated people who have developed COVID.”
Delta variant
MDH is tracking the incidence of five “variants of concern” through random and targeted samples of tests sent to the department’s laboratory weekly. That work is demonstrating that the Delta variant, which has garnered much recent attention nationwide as more contagious and for its higher hospitalization rate than other variants, is establishing a foothold here.
Across seven months ending June 14, 43 cases caused by the Delta variant had been identified. In the subsequent two weeks, 30 more Delta variant cases were found. Eighteen percent of those cases resulted in hospitalizations, markedly higher than the seven-percent rate caused by the state’s dominant UK variant.
While the seven-day case positivity average of 1.2 percent statewide remains well below the threshold for wide community spread, health officials continue to express concern for areas with low vaccination rates and their increased susceptibility to outbreaks among the unvaccinated and partially-vaccinated.
Bois Forte breakthrough
The North Country got it’s own reminder on Tuesday that fully vaccinated people still have a small risk of contracting COVID-19, as Bois Forte Band health officials announced the reservation’s first breakthrough case, an individual in their 30s living on the Nett Lake sector.
Bois Forth Health Nurse Teri Morrison could not provide additional details because of confidentiality restrictions. However, she confirmed that the rate of vaccination of tribal members 12 and over currently stands at 54 percent.
The age of the individual infected is consistent with county and statewide data indicating that new COVID cases are concentrated primarily in younger age groups. State health officials have noted that this is a result of the concentrated initial focus on vaccinating older Minnesotans. To date, 90.7 percent of Minnesotans 65 and older have received at least one shot.