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Missouri spent $25 million to aid hospitals. Contract marked by no-shows, high costs
SLSCO, a Texas-based construction company, made lofty promises to Missouri’s state health department over the summer that, if hired, it could immediately send hundreds of healthcare workers to aid struggling hospitals. As evidence, the company pointed to filling a request within 36 hours for 200 intensive care unit nurses and staff in California, and indicated […]
Missouri plotting official ‘end’ to COVID-19 pandemic as soon as March, document says
The state of Missouri is planning an official end to the COVID-19 pandemic as a public health crisis and will transition to treating the virus as endemic, much like it does the seasonal flu. The target date for when Missouri’s public health agencies would begin treating COVID-19 as endemic is mid-March, the two-year anniversary of […]
Missouri allocated $11M for vaccine gift cards. Most health departments said no thanks
As the delta variant ran rampant this summer, Missouri officials pleaded with the federal government to allow a $100 gift card program to incentivize COVID-19 vaccines. But months later, just 20 of the 115 eligible local health departments have opted into the vaccine incentive program, an investigation by The Missouri Independent and the Documenting COVID-19 […]
‘Soooo frustrating:’ Infighting, bad predictions hindered Missouri response to Delta
Dr. Robin Trotman had an inkling his Springfield hospital system was experiencing a harbinger of what was to come. It was late June, and CoxHealth was seeing an influx of COVID-19 patients who had already been vaccinated, as the highly contagious Delta variant spread unchecked through the region. Trotman, an infectious disease specialist at CoxHealth, […]