Minnesota has some natural advantages in the fight against the pandemic. But its experience could still serve as a model for others.
Last week, Vice President Mike Pence had an appointment at the Mayo Clinic to learn about how Minnesota plans to test 20,000 people per day for the coronavirus. Unfortunately, Pence’s decision to decline a facemask while there overshadowed his purpose in dropping by one of the world’s premier facilities for diagnosing illnesses — and some of the important lessons his visit should’ve highlighted. After lagging other states in screening for the coronavirus, Minnesota is now leveraging Mayo’s expertise to create a testing system that should help the state reopen its economy safely. In important respects, Minnesota is building precisely the model that the President Donald Trump’s administration envisages for other states. When I visited Rochester a few days after Pence, my host was Dr. William Morice, a hematologist and president of the Mayo Clinic Laboratories. He started out by giving me a tour of the lab’s loading docks, which receive 40,000 patient specimens each day from around the world via FedEx. Last year, the lab performed 25 million tests for more than 4 million patients, and generally reported results within 24 hours. Diagnostic and logistical expertise of that kind « go together, » Morice told me as we walked past a conveyor belt from which robotic arms were plucking patient specimens. And that combination is precisely what public-health experts are trying to replicate as states reopen their economies. So far, it hasn’t been easy. Shortages of critical materials, including nasal swabs and reagents, have led many states to limit testing to symptomatic patients and frontline workers.
