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State health officials and hospital leaders on Thursday painted an increasingly worrisome picture of Minnesota’s stressed health care systems — short-staffed, with exhausted workers struggling to meet the needs of rapidly rising numbers of patients with COVID-19 and other ills. Nearly 900 people are in Minnesota hospitals now with COVID-19, with 234 needing intensive care — the highest count so far in 2021, according to Thursday’s Health Department data. While hospitalizations aren’t skyrocketing as they did in fall 2020, the current situation is still pressuring hospitals and ICUs across Minnesota. This week, for the first time in the pandemic, there were more COVID patients hospitalized in greater Minnesota than in the Twin Cities region. “Across the state, we have more hospitals reporting that they have zero available adult medical surgical beds and zero adult ICU beds available during this latest surge,” Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm told reporters. “These are numbers we didn't see even in the worst of last fall’s surge.” The state is now down to 1 percent of hospital beds available in the Twin Cities metro region, 5 percent in the southeast and 7 percent in the central part of the state, she added. The latest numbers also show there are no pediatric hospital beds available in the central Minnesota region, only two in the southeast, one each in the northwest and south-central areas and seven available in the metro area, she said.
And MPR’s Peter Cox reports the state’s long term care industry is facing a staffing crisis. Leaders say some nursing homes could begin closing because of a lack of staffing. There are 23,000 open caregiving jobs in the state right now, according to a recent survey done by industry groups Care Providers of Minnesota and Leading Age Minnesota. That compares to early spring when there were 8,000 open positions. Patti Cullen, who leads Care Providers of Minnesota, said it's become a dire situation for many facilities. "We can't admit people if we don't have the staff to take care of them. It's not that we don't want to take care of the seniors and help the families and communities. We can not because we don't have the staff available to do that.” Burnout from 18 months of COVID work, low pay and, for some, a vaccine mandate, have all led to people leaving the industry. Leaders in the industry are asking the state to pull levers to help them increase pay as well as give emergency back up to homes that are low on staff.
Duluth has a numbers problem. Its population isn’t growing. MPR’s Dan Kraker reports the 2020 census showed the city added just 432 people over the past 10 years. That equates to a growth rate of about 0.5 percent since 2010, much lower than other regional centers around Minnesota. By comparison, Rochester grew at a 14 percent clip, St. Cloud by 5 percent and Moorhead by 17 percent. There is evidence to suggest there was a significant undercount of college students in Duluth last year, possibly by a thousand or so people. That’s because when the census was taken, at the beginning of the pandemic, college classes were all virtual. But even if you add those numbers in, Duluth's growth rate still lags behind those other cities. The population has barely budged in the last 20 years.
Minnesota Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer is interested in cryptocurrency. MinnPost reporter Ashley Hackett writes : Since reading “The Age of Cryptocurrency” at the beginning of his congressional tenure, Emmer, now co-chair of the Congressional Blockchain Caucus, has introduced a number of bills on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. But, according to Emmer, Congress still doesn’t really get it...“The bottom line is we have to leave a space that’s fluid enough so that entrepreneurs and innovators can create the next great thing here in this country,” Emmer said. “Can this completely disrupt traditional finance, and can it be a part of traditional finance? I think it can. I think it already is, I think traditional financial institutions are finding ways to lean in and be involved. It’s really important, though, that the government catch up and make sure it gets out of the way.”
Another effect of the pandemic: Employers added just 194,000 jobs in September, according to a monthly snapshot from the Labor Department. That's even worse than the anemic job gains in August and far below the pace of hiring earlier in the summer, when employers were adding around a million jobs a month. NPR has the story.
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