Situational Awareness
Viral Respiratory Illness in Minnesota

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

The syndromic surveillance data provide situational awareness to help inform public health decision making, resource allocation, and other actions.

Syndromic surveillance 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 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 concerns and events of public health importance.

These data are currently used by MDH to identify trends in COVID-19 diagnoses and related symptoms from emergency department and inpatient hospital visits through admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) messages.

More information and frequently asked questions about hospital alerting for syndromic surveillance can be found at Injury and Violence Prevention: Syndromic Surveillance.

Data include emergency department and inpatient hospital visits for COVID-19 and related symptoms through the previous Saturday. Categories are based upon ICD-10-CM discharge diagnosis codes. Beginning in 2024, the weekly COVID-19 reports transitioned to a new data source. The gray bar indicates the current reporting week. These data should be interpreted cautiously due to a lag period in the data.
These data represent all patients from about 80 hospitals in Minnesota, covering approximately 70% of the hospital beds statewide.