Three years later, Iowans still processing COVID trauma

Before masks became lightning rods and political statements, they were just swaths of fabric we wore over our faces to try to protect ourselves and others from a mysterious and deadly virus.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — which started three years ago this week in the United States — Iowans started sewing cloth masks as one of the only ways they could help health care workers and others battling the coronavirus.

For just a few weeks in spring 2020, those masks — stitched from scrap fabric of all patterns and shades — were delivered in care packages for friends and neighbors and left hanging in public spots for strangers. Area hospitals received them by the thousands.

Now, some of those cloth masks, donated but not used, are stitched together into a quilt — a quintessentially Iowa treasure that symbolizes warmth and connection.

“How can you take a mask that has become a point of divisiveness and turn it into something beautiful?” said Linda Langston, a former Linn County supervisor who developed the Red Thread Project with Cedar Rapids artist Bex Hurn.

The colorful quilt, made by the East Iowa Heirloom Quilters, is the anchor for a small exhibit commemorating the third anniversary of COVID-19 in Linn County. The traveling exhibit debuted at Prairiewoods this weekend and will be on display at several other Linn County sites throughout the year.

Linn County COVID deaths

Public health researcher Amy Hockett was shopping at Fleet Farm in Cedar Rapids when she got the call Linn County had its first confirmed case of COVID-19.

It was the third week of March 2020, a little more than a week after the coronavirus first was confirmed in Iowa.

“Our incident commander called and said ‘We have our first case. We need to go,’” said Hockett, assessment and health promotion manager for Linn County Public Health.

The first Linn County cases, reported to the public March 21, 2020, were two adults in the 18-to-40 range and another woman, age 41 to 60. The first person in Linn County to die from the novel coronavirus — as we were calling it back then — was a man between the ages of 61 and 80 who died March 28, 2020.

Since that time, 666 Linn County residents have died from the virus, according to new data from Linn County Public Health.

As part of the Red Thread Project, local public health officials put together maps that show Linn County’s COVID deaths from March 1, 2020, through Feb. 28, 2023, by census tract, which are small, geographic areas that stay relatively stable between censuses.

The data show:

“We know that where people congregate closer, there’s going to be a higher incidence of infectious disease in general,” Hockett said. “But our lower-income individuals definitely get hit a little bit harder.”

Linn County Public Health did not track the race or ethnicity of people who died from COVID, which makes it harder to see whether people of color were disproportionately harmed by the virus in Linn County.

Public health leaders now have revised policies so future employees will know if there is another emergency like COVID which data they should be collecting from the start.

Processing trauma

Starting April 1, the Iowa Department of Heath and Human Services no longer will require COVID-19 cases to be reported to the state. The national COVID-19 public health emergency — declared in March 2020 — will expire May 11.

But Iowans still are testing positive for COVID, and painful memories from early in the pandemic aren’t far below the surface, Langston said.

“You saw obits and people didn’t say if they died of COVID. Nobody was talking about it,” Langston said about 2020. “If you don’t talk about these things they tend to go sideways. I worry about that with COVID.”

Some public health employees who worked as contact tracers — tasked with calling family members of the deceased and tracking the web of human contacts — struggled with mental health during and after the early part of the pandemic, Hockett said.

“That has a significant impact on everyone involved,” she said. “We had an excellent incident commander who kept that at the forefront to make sure everyone was healthy and if they needed to step out that they could.”

Hurn said she hopes the Red Thread Project will spark conversations among spectators about their pandemic experiences, which is one way to process trauma.

The project also will include a book in which spectators can write down the names of loved ones who died from the virus and share their pandemic experiences. The book and the quilt will become part of the collection at The History Center.

The project is sponsored by Mercy Medical Center, UnityPoint Health-St. Luke’s Hospital, Linn County Public Health and On View Gallery.

Comments: (319) 339-3157; erin.jordan@thegazette.com