Credit: Navy Medicine, via Flickr
Thursday’s COVID update from the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) includes 1,505 new cases and six new deaths.
The recently reported deaths bring the state’s total to 6,762 during 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 received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, while 764,275 people completed both doses of the vaccine that are needed for the maximum effect of the vaccines.
MDH has a public dashboard to track the progress of the vaccine in Minnesota and you can view it here.
hospitalization
As of March 17, the number of people with COVID-19 hospitalized in Minnesota was 297, up from 282 reported on Tuesday.
Of those hospitalized, 74 were in intensive care (up from 67) and 223 received non-ICU treatment (up from 215).
Test rates and positivity
The 1,505 positive results from Thursday’s update were from 42,954 completed tests, creating a daily test positivity rate of 3.5%
According to Johns Hopkins University, the test positive rate in Minnesota over the past seven days is 4.45%.
The World Health Organization recommends that a positive percentage rate (total positive divided by the total number of tests completed) of less than 5% for at least two weeks be needed to safely reopen the economy. That 5% threshold is based on the total positives divided by the total tests.
Coronavirus in Minnesota by numbers
- Total tests: 7,847,879 (increasing from 7,805,641)
- Tested persons: 3,577,071 (from 3,565,769)
- People with at least 1 shot vaccine: 1,303,210 (of the 1,284,612)
- People with 2 vaccines: 764,275 (of the 746,829)
- Positive cases: 501,458 (from 499,962)
- Deaths: 6,762 – 369 of which are “probable *” (increasing from 6,756)
- Patients who no longer require isolation: 485,358 (from 484,819)
* Probable deaths are patients who died after a positive test using the COVID-19 antigen test, which is thought to be less accurate than the more common PCR test.