With little help from the federal government, states rushed to enact contracts - in some instances through verbal agreements - with testing companies that in some cases had incorporated only months earlier.
“We were now thrust into competing not as a nation on the global scale, but competing as one state against another state,” Dan Huff, assistant commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Health, said in an interview. “When all of this is over, the whole system of how testing has occurred in this country and how it's basically been driven by companies needs to be reassessed.” Susan Butler-Wu, USC Many of the problems stemmed from the Trump administration’s decision to forgo a national testing strategy, leaving states to tackle the logistical challenges largely on their own. The records and interviews show that even Minnesota, a state internationally known for its public health system, was initially caught flat-footed by the pandemic. Over the past six months, APM Reports combed through thousands of pages of documents from Minnesota and other states, dozens of testing contracts and billing records, and interviewed testing experts about the problems with the system. The state-contracted lab that conducted surveillance testing on tens of thousands of Minnesota schoolchildren and parents who were asymptomatic hadn’t obtained federal authorization for such tests. But shooting for the moon wasn’t cheap.Īn APM Reports investigation has found that the testing program in Minnesota - and in states around the country - relied on no-bid contracts for companies backed by private equity, regulatory shortcuts, and a complicated payment structure that will eventually pass tens of millions of dollars in testing costs on to the public through higher health insurance costs. Public health experts consider Minnesota’s testing program a success. We want to make sure that we understand not only who's infected but what they're infected with.” “Because we see these variants coming up. “Until we have the vast majority of the population vaccinated, testing is going to continue to be incredibly important,” said Christina Silcox, a health policy fellow at Duke University. State health officials are using the information to spot and contain potential outbreaks as new variants emerge and rip through younger populations. More than 562,000 Covid cases have been identified through testing, and Walz has used the data to intensify or roll back restrictions on schools and businesses. The state has completed more than 10 million since the pandemic began. By this April, Minnesota was administering nearly 200,000 tests per week, about five times Walz’s initial goal. “We need to be testing 40,000 a week or more.”Ī year later, the moonshot seemed to have worked. “Minnesota has tested about 40,000 since the beginning of this,” Walz said a month into the pandemic. Walz characterized the state’s testing plan as “Minnesota’s moonshot.”
And Walz, less than 18 months into his first term as governor, was staking his political future on reassuring Minnesotans that his administration could guide them out of the crisis. The pandemic had paralyzed the nation and had started killing hundreds of Americans each day. Tim Walz challenged the state’s health officials to significantly ramp up Covid testing.
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