County vaccination rates update:

This week we made an update in the Minnesota Immunization Information Connection (MIIC) to use geocoding to more precisely assign people to the county they live in. Some people who live near county borders may have previously been assigned to the wrong county due to home ZIP codes that overlap counties or other complicating factors. With this greater precision, some counties are seeing adjustments in their vaccination rates today. It does not affect Minnesota’s overall vaccination rate.

Counties that saw changes due to this update are:

• Benton

• Chisago

• Dakota

• Dodge

• Fillmore

• Goodhue

• Hennepin

• Isanti

• Olmsted

• Ramsey

• Rice

• Sherburne

• Stearns

• Swift

• Todd

• Wabasha

• Wadena

Race and ethnicity vaccination data by age update

For the race/ethnicity vaccination data provided by the Minnesota EHR Consortium and posted on the state’s Vaccine Data dashboard, a coding error was found this week that resulted in incorrect denominators being assigned to two age groups. This meant the vaccination rates calculated for people ages 15-44 were lower than they should have been and vaccination rates for the 45-64 age group were higher than they should have been across all racial and ethnic groups. General trends and absolute differences between racial/ethnic groups among the total population are not affected. The issue has been fixed for today's data posting. This data comes to the dashboard through the Minnesota EHR Consortium. After the error was detected, it was communicated to MDH and corrected within 24 hours.

Reminder: Weekend data posting schedule I

In observance of the Memorial Day holiday, the Situation Update for COVID-19 will not be updated on Monday, May 31.

Updates will resume on Tuesday, June 1, with data from Sunday, May 30.

Data posted on Wednesday, June 2 will include data from two days: May 31 and June 1. For that reason, newly reported case, hospitalization, and death numbers in the "Daily Update" box may appear greater than normal on that day. Thank you, and have a safe Memorial Day weekend.

For more information, contact:

Doug Schultz

MDH Communications

612-250-2236

doug.schultz@state.mn.us (preferred)