REGIONAL- While the record-breaking Omicron COVID wave continues to tax Minnesota’s health care system, it’s created another problem entirely for health officials trying to determine if cases are still rising or if they’ve leveled out or started falling.
That’s because for the past several weeks, the “daily” confirmed case counts reported by the Minnesota Department of Health have been confounded by the massive influx of COVID test results that created an equally massive backlog for the people tasked with recording them.
Muddying the picture further still are all of the people doing at-home testing. They only show up in the data if a person who tests positive gets a confirming test from a heath care provider or an approved testing site, such as the DECC in Duluth.
David H. Montgomery, of MPR News, specializes in reporting on data, and he’s been focused in recent weeks on getting behind those big daily MDH report numbers to look at when those cases were actually tested.
The case count for Jan. 3 was the first Montgomery reported on in his COVID e-mail updates. Nearly 78 percent of new cases reported that particular Monday were tested the prior Monday and Tuesday, Dec. 27-28. Another 13.7 percent of the “new” cases were tested before Dec. 22. That data lag showed that a “sharp uptick” in COVID cases was underway prior to the start of the new year, he noted.
In Montgomery’s most recent analysis of the number of newly confirmed cases reported on Jan. 20, 17 percent of the total, 2,658 cases, were from tests administered on Jan. 3.
“The worst part is these delays aren’t consistent or regular,” Montgomery said. “If it were simply the case that Minnesota’s testing data had gone from the five- to seven-day lag we were used to most of the pandemic to a nine- or 10-day lag, we could adjust for that. Instead this data is coming in fits and spurts.”
A comparison of cases and tests for a given day illustrates the challenge of knowing what to make of the numbers. The Jan. 20 report included 910 cases from Jan. 17. On that day there were 28,479 tests that were administered. Cases from Jan. 18 included in that report numbered just 20. Tests administered the same day totaled 17,707.
It’s not the first time in the pandemic that there has been a testing backlog. At the beginning of the Delta surge in August, one lab reported a backlog of nearly 19,000 tests. But officials have estimated the current backlog has been more than double that amount.
However, as of Tuesday, MDH is apparently chopping that backlog down significantly, thanks to added staffing and more efficient processing, Montgomery said.
Meanwhile, Montgomery has been relying on another measure, the amount of COVID viral material in people’s feces, for an additional clue to the pandemic’s trend.
“It turns out that wastewater analysis closely matches case counts and other ways to track the virus, except wastewater can flag spikes faster than traditional testing,” Montgomery said.
He hasn’t created a Poop-o-meter website for reporting his findings, but according to a report on MPR News, “Levels of COVID-19 in Twin Cities wastewater started spiking right before Christmas 2021, around Dec. 22. Reported case counts for the metro area covered by that wastewater plant didn’t start going up until a week later, around Dec. 28.”
So what was peering at the poop data telling Montgomery on Tuesday?
“Wastewater data suggest the outbreak peaked awhile ago in the Twin Cities metro,” he said.
Regional data
A look at St. Louis County’s COVID dashboard suggests that the Omicron-driven surge has either started its decline or is beginning to level out.
On Jan. 14, the seven-day average of new cases hit 338.6. On Jan. 21, that number had dropped to 255.7. The number of days between the measure is too short to declare a definitive trend, but the numbers reflect data from numerous metropolitan areas of a surge with a sharp rise and steep decline.
The Jan. 9 age-category case reports for northern St. Louis County, the latest available, show that cases among birth to nine-year-olds tripled over the prior week, going from four to 12. Cases in 40-49-year-olds almost doubled from 11 to 20. However, other age categories show slight to moderate increases, and new cases in those older than 70 dropped by two-thirds from 18 to 6.
In the six North Country zip codes monitored by the Timberjay, last Thursday’s weekly case report had Ely topping the chart with 35 new cases. Considering relative sizes, an increase of 27 new cases in Tower appears more concerning. Other increases include ten in Orr, eight in Embarrass, seven in Cook, and three in Soudan. Based on current trends and in line with the Omicron surge, January totals in the North Country are on pace to exceed the number of cases reported in December.
Cook Hospital Director of Nursing Nichole Chiabotti said Monday that the hospital continues to be busy with a high census of patients, but only a few are hospitalized with COVID. Many staff members are out with COVID, she said.
“Our biggest challenge right now is finding long-term care placement for patients,” Chiabotti said. “We are keeping people longer in the hospital because they aren’t safe to go back home and we cannot find a long-term-care bed. We have been able to transfer patients to a higher level of (medical) care a bit easier than a month ago.”