GS Labs struggled to deliver on COVID-19 testing and has been accused of overbilling and pushing patients to get unnecessary tests
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Low temperatures across Minnesota early Thursday morning will be the coolest since early June for many areas. Lows will be around 60 in the Twin Cities core, with 50s across most of Minnesota. Get the latest on Updraft. | |
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| Private COVID lab created headaches for Minnesota consumers, health officials | Nebraska-based GS Labs had trouble keeping up with demand for testing and at some points had big backlogs. APM Reports found public health officials in Minnesota and other states have been grappling with problems caused by GS Labs for more than a year.
Among the concerns: In April 2021, the company was delayed reporting 2,300 tests by up to a month, including 205 positive results, to Minnesota officials. The issues caused repeated headaches for contract tracers tasked with limiting the spread of the virus.
In August, GS Labs notified Minnesota and other states that it accepted so many tests that backlogged samples had to be stored in freezers for more than a month before they were processed.
In December, company officials told Minnesota that a lab employee at a GS Labs site in the St. Paul suburb of Maplewood caused 87 false positives.
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| Art Hounds: Art conversations across generations |
There’s still time to catch Art to Change the World’s “Age of Age” exhibit, which asks artists a generation apart to create work together. A concert performance of Janet Preus’s original musical “Water from Snow” draws big Minneapolis names to Puposky, Minn. In Duluth, Ojibwe storytime invites kids of all ages twice a week through August. | |
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Manchin, Schumer report abrupt deal on health, energy, taxes. In an unexpected turnabout, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin announced Wednesday they had reached an expansive agreement that had eluded them for months on health care, energy and climate issues, taxes on higher earners and corporations and trimming of the federal debt.
Can you buy peace of mind? Some wealthier Minneapolis neighborhoods are trying. The Minneapolis Police Department’s “buyback” program allows organizations, sports teams or neighborhoods to buy extra overtime police patrols. But the program has been criticized as inequitable and further stretching the department’s resources at a time when some less wealthy neighborhoods say police are totally unresponsive.
Facebook's parent company reports a drop in revenue for the first time ever. Facebook parent Meta was hit with a double whammy in the last three months: revenue fell for the first time ever and profit shrank for the third straight quarter, amid growing competition from TikTok and nervousness from advertisers.
Democrats' push to protect same-sex marriage is personal for Sen. Tammy Baldwin. While Justice Samuel Alito stressed in his opinion that the legal logic behind the Roe decision would not apply to other cases, Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested otherwise. He wrote in his concurring opinion that future cases "should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents," specifically listing those that protect contraception, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage. | |
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