the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Saint Paul MN,Mayo Clinic officials said Tuesday that the health giant has enough testing capacity to meet Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s benchmarks to reopen businesses after a weeks-long near-shutdown over the coronavirus pandemic.
A day after Gov. Tim Walz set 5,000 COVID-19 daily diagnostic tests with ample antibody testing capacity as the benchmark required to reopen the state for business, Mayo Clinic says it is confident it will be able to help fulfill that volume of testing.
Mayo’s Dr. William Morice, who chairs the clinic’s Department of the Department of Laboratory Medicine. Morice said Mayo could produce 8,000 daily molecular or diagnostic tests to detect infected individuals as well as 10,000 serological tests that can screen for patients who already had the disease.
Morice said, the clinic had the ability to produce 8,000 molecular or diagnostic tests daily, and 10,000 serological tests. “Basically,” he said, “we will be able to provide much of that to the state here going forward.”
Both types of tests are considered crucial to a loosening statewide restrictions that have largely kept Minnesotans in their homes for nearly three weeks now. Since the coronavirus can be easily spread by infected people before symptoms develop and a vaccine is still months or years away, experts say mass testing is needed — possibly for a long time — to keep outbreaks from getting out of control.
Mayo’s Dr. William Morice went on “We are currently in active discussions with the state government to try to understand how our capacity can help provide the testing needed, as other hospitals are as well.”
of course it does…. it always did.