REGIONAL- National and state health officials alike are signaling that the worst of the Omicron COVID wave is now behind us, but the struggle continues for healthcare systems in northeastern Minnesota as hospital capacity remains strained.
Data from the Minnesota Department of Health show the state added 32,189 new COVID-19 cases in the seven days between Feb. 2 and Feb. 8, for an average of 4,598 new cases per day. That’s down from an 11,165 new case daily average the week prior. The most recent seven-day case positivity rate also continued dropping, from 21 percent to 14.9 percent.
St. Louis County’s seven-day case average hit a high of 401.7 on Jan. 18, but has since fallen by almost two-thirds, registering 142.9 on Feb. 4.
Steve Leslie, COVID response coordinator for the St. Louis County Public Health Division, viewed the trend positively.
“Just based on numbers, we were at a pretty high case rate towards the end of January,” Leslie said. “Now that case rates are really down, at under 150 cases, that’s promising.”
But Leslie quickly tempered his comments by noting that declining case rates don’t reflect what hospitals in the region are seeing.
“In talking with healthcare systems and the hospitals in the region, they’re still full, they’re still seeing a high, high caseload of COVID patients,” he said.
That runs counter to what’s been reported for the southern portion of the state, where capacity issues are easing, but it’s not surprising that we’re not seeing that here yet, Leslie said.
“From what I’ve seen over the past couple of years, I’d say we in the Northland are always behind a little bit,” Leslie said. “If you see a surge elsewhere, usually it takes awhile to get to us. I think a lot of that has to do with distance and the rural nature of St. Louis County.”
Also impacting the hospital crunch is the fact that increases in hospitalizations and death rates typically lag behind changes in case rates by two to three weeks, and that even with the significant drop in cases, the rates remain higher than during many periods of the pandemic.
Two other factors also potentially confound the case rate numbers and may result in underreporting actual case numbers. One of those is the prevalence of at-home testing, which isn’t accounted for in MDH data unless a person gets a confirmatory test through a community healthcare provider.
The other factor, Leslie said, is the number of people who are getting tested. As Leslie works out of the county offices in Hibbing, he’s well acquainted with what’s happening in the special testing sites in the Iron Range.
“I help lead the testing clinics we have up in the north,” Leslie said. “We’re doing three clinics a week in Virginia, Eveleth and Ely right now. We haven’t seen huge demand, especially in our northern sites. At one time what we heard from the (state-sponsored) DECC site was that they had huge lines, but we just didn’t see that need or uptake up north.”
Leslie also noted that demand at the county clinics may not reflect what’s happening with other testing options such as community health care centers. He did say that a testing site in Hibbing operated by the Minnesota National Guard has shut down so that personnel could be reassigned to help out with staffing shortages in nursing facilities.
Having multiple entities involved in providing services such as testing and vaccinations has sometimes been challenging during the pandemic, Leslie said, and can occasionally lead to some confusion forthe public.
For example, the county health department has received an allocation of masks from the state that they are distributing to targeted and disadvantaged populations through community organization partnerships, Leslie said. However, those masks are separate from the allotments the Biden administration is sending to states for distribution.
“We don’t have anything to do with that,” Leslie said. “We haven’t been told we’re getting a supply, and I think most of those are going to be distributed among pharmacies and health care systems. We do meet weekly with the healthcare systems and try to do our best to coordinate with other county and area health care partners to do what we can.”
Another measure used to compare different regions of the county has recently been showing that the northern region has fared far better than elsewhere in numbers of COVID infections, but Leslie said it’s difficult to know just what those numbers actually reflect.
“These are all testing numbers, and you’re not going to have a case unless you’ve had testing,” he said. “Are people more apt to test in the Duluth area than the northern part of the county? Maybe those numbers are lower, but what’s the context? Maybe they don’t have as much access to testing. So, I really have a hard time saying one way or the other because of this or that.”
“But again, as I said, the numbers are promising,” he concluded.