Many of the costs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t easily visible – nursing home residents’ deaths, for example, as well as the increasing number of opioid overdoses, and the businesses going bankrupt due to combined government-mandated restrictions and reduced consumer demand.

About 854,600 people have filed unemployment claims since March after Minnesota’s first case of COVID-19, pushing many people onto federally bankrolled food assistance programs, spiking costs by over $30 million.