Editor’s Note: Due to COVID-19, TommieMedia staff members are working remotely. This is a special News in :90 report from Alexis’ home in St. Paul, Minn.
Governor Tim Walz announced Wednesday that Minnesota is partnering with the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic to test as many as 20,000 people per day for COVID-19.
Walz called the partnership a breakthrough for rapid and widespread testing for COVID-19, which is seen as a key across the country for reopening businesses amid the pandemic. Everyone with symptoms of the coronavirus can get tested once the plan ramps up, he promised.
The announcement went well beyond Walz’s stated goal earlier this month of 5,000 tests per day, a number he said he threw out to challenge his team.
Neither the governor nor other state and health system officials gave a firm timetable for reaching 20,000 tests per day except to say that they were aiming to do it in the next few weeks.
In national news, the government announced Thursday more than 4.4 million laid-off workers applied for U.S. unemployment benefits last week as job cuts escalated across an economy that remains all but shut down.
Roughly 26 million people have filed for jobless aid in the five weeks since the COVID-19 outbreak forced millions of businesses to close their doors.
About one in six American workers have lost their jobs in the past five weeks, making it the worst string of layoffs on record. Economists have forecast that the unemployment rate for April could go as high as 20%.
St. Thomas biology professor and published researcher Afshan Ismat is working on a research project with undergraduate students to discover how cancer cells spread from tumors into other parts of the body.
Ismat, associate chair of the biology department, is researching the process, called metastasization, which leads to more severe stages of cancer. Ismat is using fruit flies to conduct her research on this topic.
“We use fruit flies because fruit flies and humans actually share about 75% of their genome,” Ismat said.
Alexis Okafor can be reached at okaf1618@stthomas.edu.