Gazette Daily News Podcast, July 14

There will be a small chance for rain on Thursday but the higher chance for rain will be Friday. According to the National Weather Service, there will be a 20 percent chance of rain before 10 a.m. in the Cedar Rapids area. After that it will be partly with a high near 86 degrees. Thursday night it will be mostly cloudy with a low of around 69 degrees.

Iowa saw a 30 percent jump in new coronavirus infections in the past seven days, new state and federal coronavirus data released this week shows.

The Iowa Department of Public Health reported 5,187 new COVID-19 cases in the past seven days — a 30 percent jump from the 3,980 cases reported last week.

The spike comes after case counts had remained in the 3,900 range for the past four weeks. It remains to be seen whether this is an anomaly or a sign of the presence of omicron variants of the virus that have been pushing infection rates up in other parts of the world.

Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the past week were also up, totaling 229 in Iowa, compared to 190 patients hospitalized last week, according to federal health data.

Neither of Iowa’s Republican U.S. senators expressed support for a nationwide ban on abortions when asked about that possibility Wednesday.

On separate conference calls with Iowa reporters, both Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst said the issue of abortion regulations now rests with individual states after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that eliminated what had been a federally guaranteed right to abortion access.

For a national abortion ban to pass, Republicans would have to regain majorities in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, and win back the White House. And assuming the filibuster still is in place, Republicans would need 60 votes to pass a ban through the Senate.

Grassley also said he could not support any provision that would make it a crime for a pregnant person who lives in a state where abortion becomes illegal to have one in a state where it remains legal. Grassley said he believes such a provision would be unconstitutional.

He said the right to travel between states is “one of the principles of freedom in America.”

An explosion Wednesday morning destroyed two houses in the northwest Iowa city of Le Mars and injured three people.

The 6:30 a.m. explosion demolished two adjacent houses and damaged a third house, Le Mars Fire-Rescue Chief Dave Schipper told the Sioux City Journal.

The people who were injured were inside or around one of the homes. Two were taken to a Le Mars hospital, and one was taken to a Sioux City hospital and later transferred to a burn center in Lincoln, Neb.

Schipper called it “very fortunate" that no one died in the explosion, which he thinks was caused by a gas leak. The explosion was so powerful it shook homes blocks away and damaged doors and windows, including at a nearby fire station.