Minnesota recorded another hopeful milestone in its pandemic battle Tuesday when just 95 new cases of coronavirus were reported — the lowest in one day since April 2020.
For more than 400 straight days, Minnesota had reported 100 or more COVID-19 cases per day. For a stretch of more than 160 days last fall and winter, daily new cases were in the thousands.
The record low doesn’t include holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and Memorial Day, when the state Department of Health did not report new data.
The rate of COVID-19 deaths has also slowed. Minnesota’s seven-day rolling average for deaths is about six per day.
There was one additional fatality reported Tuesday, a Hennepin County resident in their 90s.
Minnesota has recorded 603,966 cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began. There have been 7,518 deaths, including 4,457 in long-term care.
The state has screened more than 10 million samples from 4.4 million residents since March 2020. The cumulative test-positivity rate is about 6 percent and the current average of positive tests is about 1.2 percent.
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Of those who’ve tested positive, 595,183, or 98.5 percent, have recovered enough they no longer need to be isolated.
About 88 percent of Minnesota’s COVID-19 fatalities have been seniors, but deaths have begun to trend younger after close to 90 percent of seniors have been vaccinated.
Hospitalizations have also fallen to their lowest levels in more than a year. There were 147 patients hospitalized, including 49 in critical condition.
Hospitalizations have also continued to trend younger.
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Health officials say that’s due, in part, to more contagious variants of the coronavirus being responsible for most new cases. Some emerging strains of COVID-19 are also suspected to cause more severe disease.
Vaccines have proven very effective against both the original strain of coronavirus and the new variants. Health officials say more than 99.9 percent of new COVID-19 cases are in people who are not vaccinated.
Minnesota has administered 5.5 million doses of vaccine and nearly 3 million residents have gotten at least one dose. Almost 66 percent of the population 16 and older have gotten their first shot.
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