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Minnesota public health leaders for weeks have warned the state’s skyrocketing COVID-19 caseload would bring more hospitalizations and deaths. Those warnings are coming to pass in a succession of new highs in cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
State health officials on Thursday reported 7,228 newly confirmed or probable cases — the first time the daily count has crossed 7,000. That pushed the state above 200,000 confirmed cases in the pandemic, with about 37,000 of those coming in just the past seven days.
Here are Minnesota’s COVID-19 statistics:
- 2,793 deaths (39 new)
- 201,795 positive cases (7,228 new), 159,467 off isolation
- 3.25 million tests, 2.07 million people tested (36 percent of the population)
- 14.2 percent seven-day positive test rate (officials find 5 percent concerning)
This week, the state launched a big push to get more people in this age group tested regularly, opening additional saliva testing sites around the state and announcing a statewide program that allows people to order and conduct saliva tests in their home.
"This is just inevitable if we do not change our behaviors and take some mitigation efforts, this will continue to spike,” a frustrated Gov. Tim Walz said Wednesday, a day after he tightened restrictions on late-night social life to stem the spread of the disease.
Those new restrictions have also been placed on large gatherings like weddings. For Minnesotans who’ve been planning weddings, or who work in the industry, it’s one more change in an already tumultuous year.
Chase Liaboe and Morgan Smith got engaged last December. They’d been dating eight years, and thinking about a wedding for a long time. They planned to get married on Dec. 12. But as the year progressed, COVID-19 intruded on the couple’s countdown rituals.
“A lot of the little things that you look forward to in wedding planning were slowly getting taken away from us, day by day: not being able to do tastings for cake, or tastings for catering, not being able to go try on tuxes with your groomsmen,” Liaboe said.
According to the Minnesota Department of Health, 851 COVID-19 cases were tied to weddings through October, which is second only to restaurants and bars, in terms of origins of social outbreaks in the state.
Relatively few Minnesota voters risked having a mail ballot arrive after Election Day, judging by the small number that came in during the subsequent week.
New figures from 82 of 87 counties compiled by the Secretary of State’s office show only 2,436 ballots arrived late and had to be segregated under a federal court’s order. Those ballots were counted and there hasn’t been a direct challenge to their validity.
The extra window was the result of a court decree agreed to by Secretary of State Steve Simon and groups who sued for more time amid the pandemic. A group of Republicans sued, saying the decree wasn’t constitutional. The federal appeals court ordered five days before the election that those ballots would be kept separate in case the votes had to be subtracted during the ongoing litigation.
Elections officials and prominent politicians urged voters not to take a chance. And it appears many of the 228,000 people in possession of an unvoted mail or absentee ballot chose to vote at a polling site instead.
A coalition of federal and state officials said Thursday that they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered in last week's presidential election, rejecting unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by President Donald Trump and many of his supporters.
The statement from cybersecurity experts, which trumpeted the Nov. 3 election as the most secure in American history, amounted to the most direct repudiation to date of Trump's efforts to undermine the integrity of the contest.
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