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MPR News Staff

With Minnesota’s stay-at-home order set to expire next week, Gov. Tim Walz will announce on Thursday afternoon his plans for restarting parts of the economy.

Some restrictions for many customer-facing businesses will continue beyond Monday, when his current stay-at-home order is set to end, but other sectors of the economy are expected to see loosened restrictions.

However, Walz and other officials will continue their calls for people to keep their distance and stay out of crowds — the governor has made clear that places that depend on public crowds, including bars, eateries and big sporting events, will be the last ones to return to normal business operations.

“The guidance to stay close to home and to restrict large gatherings, to restrict close contact with anyone outside of your immediate household, those things are going to stand by,” Minnesota Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm told reporters Wednesday.

As restrictions relax and testing ramps up, health leaders said Minnesotans should expect to see the COVID-19 outbreak widen, but they expressed confidence that Minnesota’s health care system was prepared to deal with an expected surge of cases and hospitalizations.

The toll continued climbing Wednesday with 18 new deaths, including a 30-year-old — the youngest victim so far. Of those who’ve died, nearly 80 percent were living in long-term care facilities and 99 percent had underlying health problems officials said.

Here are the latest coronavirus statistics:

•4,644 cases confirmed via 66,744 tests
•319 deaths
•950 cases requiring hospitalization
•320 people remain in the hospital; 119 in intensive care
•2,043 patients recovered

Small towns may reopen sooner, but rural outbreaks persist

At a briefing Wednesday in southwestern Minnesota, Walz said that small-town businesses may be close to getting the green light to conditionally reopen.

The governor was appearing in Worthington and the JBS pork plant — the center of Nobles County’s outbreak, the largest in Minnesota outside the Twin Cities. The county had 615 cases confirmed Wednesday.

Beyond the ill and unemployed workers, the cascading effects of the shutdown of JBS and of the massive Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., are also hitting pork producers hard. With those plants down, farmers have few places to sell the animals and so are being forced to destroy them, Minnesota Agriculture Commissioner Thom Petersen said Monday.

At a Wednesday press conference, Minnesota DFL U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson said state officials together with JBS executives and union leaders would be working on a plan that would allow the plant to reopen while keeping workers safe and tested as they enter.

Peterson said nearly 500 JBS workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, about 20 to 25 percent of the plant’s workforce.

Restarting JBS, he said, would require slowing down the hog processing and spacing out workers on the line with shields between them. Peterson added that U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told him Wednesday morning that the JBS and Smithfield plant reopenings were a top priority and that he wanted JBS running in two or three days.

“I agree with him, but I’m not sure what the timeline is,” Peterson said.

Kandiyohi County in west-central Minnesota is also seeing cases jump a week after officials with the Jennie-O turkey processing plant said some employees had tested positive for the coronavirus.

A week ago, Kandiyohi County, where the Willmar plant is located, had confirmed three COVID-19 cases. On Wednesday, the Health Department reported 88 people have now tested positive.

Economic stress

The economic fallout from COVID-19 extends far beyond agriculture.

Some 564,000 Minnesotans have applied for standard unemployment benefits since the middle of March, officials said Wednesday, although the pace of applications is slowing.

There have also been 40,000 independent contractors or self-employed people who have been paid so far through a special pandemic unemployment insurance program, said Steve Grove, commissioner of the Department of Employment and Economic Development.

Grove declined to say if hair salons would be allowed to reopen or dining-in at restaurants would be permitted as part of Walz’s coming next steps. But he said person-to-person contact is “trickier” to manage safely than someone coming to a store, picking up something and leaving.