Good morning, We'll start this week off with some rain. The chance of rain is near 100 percent in the Twin Cities Monday, with temperatures falling from mid-60s to lower 50s in the afternoon. Northwest Minnesota can expect highs in the 30s, and upper 60s in the southeast. Tuesday' is expected to be much colder. More on Updraft
President-elect Joe Biden said Friday, as ballots were still being tabulated in states across the country, that voters had spoken loudly to embrace the policies and principles he campaigned on. Biden followed Saturday night by calling on Democrats and Republicans to come together after the election and pledged to join them. But Biden, who secured enough votes to win the electoral college on Saturday morning, will face a narrowly divided Congress when he takes office in January. Biden's significant lead in the popular vote did not translate to a Democratic wave in the House and Senate, leaving Biden without the votes necessary to pursue an aggressive legislative agenda in Congress.
President Trump refuses to acknowledge the results of the election and is spreading false claims about election fraud on Twitter. Is isn't clear if Trump will try to impede Biden's transition.
Hopes that Minnesota had suffered the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic last spring unraveled in the past week as caseloads skyrocketed to new records while hospitalizations and deaths climbed steeply.
A tough October became a brutal first week of November, with state officials bracing Minnesotans for things to worsen before they improve. Monday could be bring more unhappy records.
The disease’s steady climb this fall has been significant: It took eight months for Minnesota to reach 180,000 confirmed cases. If the current pace continues, the state could now be on track to for another 180,000 cases in a month.
Here are Minnesota’s current COVID-19 statistics:
- 2,656 deaths (31 new deaths reported Sunday)
- 180,862 positive cases (5,924 new cases), 146,311 off isolation
- 3.1 million tests, 2 million people tested
As Minnesota’s latest coronavirus surge spreads across the central part of the state, CentraCare, the region’s main health care provider, is seeing rising numbers of COVID-19 cases in its hospitals.
Almost a quarter of the patients at St. Cloud Hospital have COVID-19, and the intensive care units at CentraCare hospitals are nearly full, with more than half of those cases related to the virus.
CentraCare expanded its ICU bed capacity in the early days of the pandemic, but its regular caseload of intensive care patients hasn't stopped, said Dr. George Morris, medical incident commander for CentraCare’s COVID-19 response team.
"Right now, we are trying to do that balance,” he said. “We have to still care for heart attacks, strokes, trauma, emergencies, people with regular, high-level medical needs. Along with that, we have this huge percentage of [patients] that are in there related to COVID."
Morris said they've made adjustments to handle the surge, including having staff working longer or extra shifts, and moving staff from other medical areas to the ICU. However, he said maintaining sufficient staffing levels is a challenge.
-- Matt Mikus, MPR News ( @mikusmatt) |
