(Johnston)– The Iowa Department of Public Health today (Friday) is reporting an additional 521 new cases of COVID-19 for a total of 4,445 positive cases so far. That’s the highest number yet reported in a single day. Officials attribute that to a large increase in the number of tests being conducted with a total of 2,712 tests that were done Thursday. 11 additional deaths were also reported.
At her press conference today (Fri.), Governor Kim Reynolds said she will allow the resumption of elective medical procedures beginning Monday, and will allow farmer’s markets to open statewide…
“On Monday each hospital outpatient surgery center or clinic that determines they can safely do so, may begin. They may begin rescheduling patients and resume surgeries and procedures according to their own schedules. In addition the proclamation that I’ll be signing today permits farmers markets to begin limited operations with appropriate public health precautions and provides additional relief to Iowans that are affected by this disaster.”
She indicated a decision on re-opening other businesses won’t be made until next week…
“On Monday I will be making additional announcements regarding the first phase of reopening Iowa. And so until then I want to thank every Iowan for making our comeback possible. Today we’re taking the first steps to get life and businesses back to normal, but as I mentioned yesterday it’s kind of a new normal that we’re heading into. And so we’re going to continue to ask you to do your part and if we remain committed to working together in doing the right thing I believe that we will start and be able to responsibly open Iowa back up, and I really do look forward to sharing with you on Monday the details of what that looks like.”
Governor Reynolds was asked about opening things back up even though the state’s caseload and fatality rate continues to spike…
“As we’re testing more, we’re testing in hot spots so that we can identify, isolate, and start to really make sure that we’re protecting the health and well being of the workforce, and this is key for us to be able to do that, but it also allows us. We had this capability before but it even gives us additional information and data to really comprehensively monitor the cases through the Test Iowa so we’re able to look at it not only from a statewide perspective but we can look at it from a regional perspective, we can look at it on a county by county perspective, right down to a community and a zip code. So all of that allows us to be very targeted in how we respond. It allows us to start to open up other areas where there are no cases or very few cases that haven’t been and even in a lot of counties that have had minimal cases they’ve already had several of them recover. And so you have to take that in account as well.”
The 11 deaths reported today (Fri.) is the highest number of fatalities in a day associated with the virus so far in Iowa. It brings the total number of deaths from COVID-19 in Iowa to date to 107.
