Gazette Daily News Podcast, May 5

Back to rain again Thursday and Friday. According to the National Weather Service there will be a 40 percent chance of rain in the Cedar Rapids area mainly after noon and this will jump up to 80 percent by Thursday evening. Otherwise it will be cloudy with a high temperature near 54 degrees.

Toyota Financial Services will eliminate 322 positions in Cedar Rapids, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with Iowa Workforce Development on Monday.

The move is not entirely unexpected. In March 2021, the company said it would relocate its customer service center that at the time employed 600 within the next two years.

The service centers are to be consolidated to Chandler, Ariz., Plano, Texas, and Alpharetta, Ga.

Vincent Bray, corporate communications senior manager, told The Gazette in an email Wednesday “that every team member in good standing at Cedar Rapids who wanted to continue with the organization has been offered a position at one of our other locations.”

The number of new COVID-19 cases continued to increase in Iowa in the past week, but the number of coronavirus deaths in the state remains low.

The state added 2,114 new coronavirus cases in the past seven days, up 23 percent from the 1,716 new cases reported last week, according to new data from the Iowa Department of Public Health.

New cases have been increasing steadily in Iowa for more than a month as the omicron subvariant, BA.2, has become the dominant coronavirus strain in the Midwest and the rest of the country.

Despite this, hospitalizations only ticked up slightly this week. There also was some good news on deaths from the virus. On Wednesday, the state public health department confirmed four deaths as a result of the coronavirus in Iowa — the lowest number of deaths confirmed in one week since the pandemic began, data shows.

If you stream it, people might get Peacock. Probably not, but it’s worth a try.

This summer, a new diamond in the rough will be created in the Des Moines area for a seven-part Field of Dreams prequel series to be streamed next year on Peacock. The show will take a deeper dive into the backstory and characters from the original film, said Liz Gilman, film commissioner with Produce Iowa, the State Office of Media Production, based in Des Moines.

The cast hasn’t been announced yet, but Gilman has been told people will recognize the names. She also hasn’t heard if Kevin Costner, who starred in the original film, will be attached to the production.

Shooting is slated for Polk County, Boone, Oskaloosa and Clinton, and Iowans are invited to get in on the action.

Other scenes will be shot in Minneapolis, Boston and Los Angeles.