Iowa passes 10,000 COVID-19 deaths

Iowa this week surpassed 10,000 deaths from COVID-19.

As of Wednesday, the pandemic’s death toll reached 10,051 in Iowa, after another 57 deaths were confirmed in the past week. That weekly total is more than double the previous week’s 26.

Johnson and Marshall counties reported five deaths each in the past week, more than any other Iowa counties.

Since March 2020, Johnson County has reported 164 deaths from the virus. Linn County reported one death in the past week, bringing its total to 622.

The virus has claimed more than a million lives in the United States in the past two-and-a-half years. And while it’s not the crisis it once was, hundreds of people are still dying each day from COVID-19.

President Joe Biden, during an interview on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, said, "The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one's wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it's changing.”

The Biden administration is seeking an additional $22.4 billion from Congress to keep funding the nation’s COVID-19 response as deaths continue and others are dealing with long-term complications caused by the virus.

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has loosened COVID-19 guidelines in the past months — issuing the same guidelines for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals and cutting the quarantine period from 10 days to five — it has not declared an end to the pandemic.

New cases

Iowa reported 2,908 new COVID-19 cases in the past week, down almost 30 percent from last week’s 4,109 new cases.

Since March 2020, 853,840 cases have been reported in Iowa. The actual total is likely higher, given the availability of at-home test kits, which are not reported to the state.

Last week, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported Iowa does not include subsequent COVID-19 infections of the same person in the new case count reported to federal health officials or in the weekly case updates on its website, even though other states do so.

Iowa Department of Health and Human Services officials said they are unaware of the state’s rate of those reinfections despite possessing the data necessary to calculate it.

In the past week, Linn County reported 223 new cases, down from 339 the previous week. The county has reported 60,375 cases since March 2020.

Johnson County reported 197 new cases in the past week, down from 243 last week, with a total 41,998 cases since the pandemic began.

Hospitalizations

In the past week, COVID-19 hospitalizations decreased from 232 to 219 in Iowa.

The number of patients in intensive care units across the state decreased from 21 to 19, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Vaccinations

As of Sept. 5, the Iowa Immunization Registry Information System. reported that 59.4 percent of all Iowans are fully vaccinated against the virus, an increase of 0.2 percent from August. The vaccination information is updated once a month.

In Linn County, 66 percent of the county population is fully vaccinated. In Johnson County, that number is 70.5.

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