Health department takes new approach to reporting COVID-19 data

Jul. 1—MANKATO — The Minnesota Department of Health shifted to weekly COVID-19 updates Thursday, ending the run of near-daily reporting dating back to the pandemic's early stages.

The change signals a new phase of the pandemic, where reporting schedules resemble what the health department, also known as MDH, does for influenza and measles.

COVID-19 remains deadlier than those other contagious illnesses, but it isn't causing the death and hospitalization numbers that threatened to overwhelm hospitals earlier in the pandemic.

MDH's shift, including a newly unveiled COVID-19 update page, will prompt changes to the Free Press' approach to reporting on the pandemic.

The Free Press had been using MDH's daily updates to calculate weekly case totals for the nine area counties as of end of day Fridays. Going forward, the Free Press will use the numbers MDH reports in its weekly updates as of end of day Thursdays.

Because the weekly windows don't precisely overlap, comparing future trends to past trends could prove challenging. The new update page does lean on case and death rates more than it used to, but raw case and death totals — helpful in mapping out trends — for counties since the pandemic began are less accessible.

Blue Earth County did have one newly confirmed COVID-19 death this week, a 90- to 94-year-old on Tuesday. MDH's new page appears to no longer list the age ranges for newly reported deaths going forward from Thursday, another change to the new system.

The page shows the south-central region as having 252 new cases during the most recent week, a 13% decrease from the prior week. Seven of the nine area counties had drops in cases during the most recent week.

Nicollet County was the sole county to have an uptick in cases, rising from 30 to 33. Brown County's weekly case count stayed level at 27 both weeks.

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