Situational Awareness
COVID-19 Situation Update

• Download: Syndromic surveillance (CSV)
• Download: Syndromic surveillance by Region (CSV)

These syndromic surveillance data come from the Encounter Alert Service (EAS), which is utilizing an existing service to support and leverage the development of this activity. These data provide situational awareness to help inform public health decision making, resource allocation, and other actions.

Syndromic Surveillance is public health surveillance that emphasizes the use of near real-time pre-diagnostic data and statistical tools to detect and characterize unusual activity for further public health investigation. Syndromic surveillance systems may be used for outbreak-specific situational awareness to characterize an outbreak beyond initial detection, to monitor the spread of an outbreak, and/or to monitor the effectiveness of outbreak response and intervention strategies. These data help public health officials detect, monitor, and respond quickly to local public health threats and events of public health importance. These data are currently being used by MDH to identify trends in COVID-19-related symptoms and chief complaints through emergency department and inpatient hospital visits (through admission, discharge, and transfer data).

More information and frequently asked questions about hospital alerting for syndromic surveillance can be at Hospital Alerting for Syndromic Surveillance: COVID-19/SAR-CoV-2.

Data include emergency-department and inpatient hospital visits for COVID-like illness through last Saturday. Categories are based upon discharge diagnosis codes. Beginning with the Nov. 27, 2020, Weekly COVID-19 report, conditions are reported from week 30 (July 20, 2020) forward due to a transition in data sources. The gray bar indicates a one-week lag period in the data.
Through last Saturday, these data represent all patients from about 135 hospitals in Minnesota, covering approximately 90% of the hospital beds statewide.