One day after national Republican leaders praised Gov. Kim Reynolds as “a national leader in effectively balancing lives and livelihoods” during the pandemic, the Iowa Department of Public Health disclosed that more than 9,000 Iowans have died from COVID-19.
In its update on Wednesday, IDPH reported another 137 deaths from the virus, bringing the state’s official COVID-19 death toll to 9,085. In an op-ed for the Des Moines Register in October, Dr. James A. Merchant wrote that Reynolds’ extremely minimal approach to controlling the spread of the virus had led to thousands of unnecessary deaths, that likely would not have happened if Iowa had the same mitigation measures as Minnesota.
“It is instructive to compare Iowa and Minnesota, which have nearly identical proportions of their populations at high risk because of being 65 years of age and older (17%). Minnesota, however, has nearly double the proportion of minorities, a second well-established risk factor for increased COVID-19 mortality,” Merchant, former director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Division of Respiratory Disease Studies and founding dean of the University of Iowa College of Public Health, wrote. “Yet, Iowa has suffered 99 per 100,000 population more COVID-19 deaths than has Minnesota, a total of over 3,000 excess preventable deaths for Iowa’s population of 3.155 million as of 2019.”
At the time, the state’s official death toll was still below 7,000.
Still, Reynolds’ record on COVID-19 was one of the reasons she was selected to deliver the Republican Party’s televised response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, March 1, according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“She fought COVID without forgetting common sense and protected Iowans’ health and their rights at the same time,” McConnell said in a written statement on Tuesday, announcing the selection of Reynolds.
In its second weekly update since iowa.coronavirus.gov was decommissioned following the governor’s decision to stop officially classifying COVID-19 as a public health emergency and instead have state agencies treat it the same way they do the flu, IDPH reported the number of newly confirmed cases declined for the fifth consecutive week.
According to IDPH, 4,814 people tested positive for the virus during the most recent seven-day reporting period. Although this week’s update reported the lowest rate of new infections per day since the Omicron-fueled surge began at the end of last year, the number of COVID-19 cases is still vastly higher than the number of new flu cases.
In its most recent flu report, IDPH said there were 540 new flu cases during the week ending Feb. 12.
IDPH no longer publishes the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients and instead tells people to check the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services hospital utilization tracker for that data. According to the tracker, 338 COVID-19 patients were admitted to Iowa hospitals during the seven-day period ending Tuesday. IDPH, however, does include the number of hospitalized flu patients in its weekly flu reports. There were 14.
In an attempt to provide COVID-19 information in a readily accessible way since the state no longer does, the Iowa Newspaper Association launched a new site on Thursday: Iowacoviddata.com. The site is run as a cooperative effort by the Gazette, the Des Moines Register, the Daily Iowan and the Times Citizen of Iowa Falls.
“This project pulls together in one place for Iowans as much of the same information as the state health department previously gathered on its website,” Susan Patterson Plank, executive director of the Iowa Newspaper Association, said in a statement.
Iowacoviddata.com will be updated each Wednesday, as new information becomes available.
