Governor Tim Walz says testing for COVID-19 will be a part of re-opening the state’s economy. The governor says, “It does us no good to send everybody back to work and then get everybody sick. What it *does* do us good is to be able to send folks back to work who, 1) may be immune because they’ve had it, 2) have just been tested and they’re symptom-free, and 3) we have the resources necessary, should someone get sick, that it doesn’t become a hot spot.”
Walz says Minnesota will have to “go it alone” on procuring COVID test supplies and can’t expect help from the federal government. He points to Mayo Clinic’s success developing an antibody test to detect whether someone has already had COVID without knowing it.
And the governor says he wants COVID testing of workers in Minnesota’s food processing facilities to begin soon: “I’m talking with a sense of immediacy, within the next week or so. These are things that I wanted to happen during the stay-at-home order:… You stay at home, we will ramp up the hospitals, we will ramp up the ventilators,… and we will figure out how to do testing.”