Credit: Navy Medicine, via Flickr
Thursday’s COVID update from the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) contains 1,505 new cases and six new deaths.
The newly reported deaths bring the state to 6,762 in the course of the pandemic. Of the total deaths, 63% (4,244) were residents of long-term care.
As of March 16, the state reported that 1,303,210 people had received at least 1 dose of COVID-19 vaccine, while 764,275 people had completed both doses of vaccination required for the maximum effect of the vaccines.
MDH has a public dashboard to track the progress of vaccines in Minnesota, and you can see it here.
Hospitalizations
As of March 17, the number of people with COVID-19 hospitalized in Minnesota was 297, which is higher than 282 reported Tuesday.
Of those admitted to the hospital, 74 were in intensive care (versus 67) and 223 received non-ICU treatment (versus 215).
Test and positivity figures
The 1,505 positive results in the Thursday update were of 42,954 completed tests, resulting in a daily test positivity of 3.5%
According to Johns Hopkins University, Minnesota’s positivity rate over the past seven days is 4.45%.
The World Health Organization recommends that a percentage of positive rate (total positive divided by total completed tests) for at least two weeks below 5% is needed to safely reopen the economy. The 5% threshold is based on total positive share through total tests.
Coronavirus in Minnesota by Numbers
- Total tests: 7,847,879 (from 7,805,641)
- People tested: 3 577 071 (from 3565 769)
- People shot with at least 1 vaccination: 1,303,210 (from 1,284,612)
- People with 2 vaccine shots: 764,275 (from 746,829)
- Positive cases: 501 458 (from 499 962)
- Deaths: 6,762 – of which 369 are “probably *” (compared to 6,756)
- Patients who no longer need isolation: 485,358 (from 484 819)
* Probable deaths are patients who died after testing positive using the COVID-19 antigen test, which is thought to be less accurate than the more common PCR test.