Dr. John R. Finnegan

And the other thing is that so much destruction of the infrastructure has happened even up to now that I really think the states, as I mentioned at the beginning, states have the primary authority for public health.

And I would say this is a point where the states previously have depended very much on federal government funding.

And I think one strategy that they're going to need to look at here over the next couple of years or four years is how can they form, let's say, regional collaboratives or interstate compacts

and focus on data and so forth, so that we're not just seeing the data in Minnesota, which is important to us, but whatever happens in Minnesota is going to happen in the other states, especially if we're talking viral or infectious diseases in some way, shape, or form.

And I think that's going to be the state departments of health, I hope, will be motivated to form, you know, perhaps regional partnerships or interstate compacts or something like that.

And I think they're also gonna have to partner differently, and I would say partner with academic and nonprofit institutions to get some of the resources back, because I know we have a lot of resources in the University of Minnesota.

It's a big R1 university, and almost every state has an R1 or R2 university.

So I think that's going to be important.

But I think also, you know, partnering with private sector organizations, find those businesses that can really help us out and rebuild on a permanent or temporary basis.

And you've got to engage better, as Dr. Bains was saying, you really got to engage better with local health systems, and healthcare systems and so forth.

And, you know, there's some other tricks that we've learned during COVID that work really well.

One is, let's focus on wastewater and environmental surveillance.

Wow, did we learn a lot from that?

You know, from the standpoint of what's in the wastewater, it gives us a sense of what viruses are floating around and so forth.

So that's an area.

And then I think wherever we can, we've got to go after the regulatory and the legal tools that may be available to us to assure that we can do the job that needs to get done until the country returns to its senses politically.

Partly what I'm suggesting here is that if we can't depend on the federal government right now,

then you're going to have to develop cross-sectoral coalitions within states, within regions, and so forth to do exactly what you're talking about.

And that is well-tested stuff.

We know that cross-sectoral relations, and by that, I mean, it's not just those of us in the health professions.