Iowa seeing ‘somewhat of a surge’ in COVID-19

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) - COVID-19 cases are trending back up in Iowa, according to a health leader in Dubuque.

The graph below shows statewide positive COVID-19 tests and is taken from the Iowa Department of Public Health. The bump at the far right representing recent weeks is smaller than the high points of Winter 2020 and January 2022. However, according to Mary Rose Corrigan, Public Health Specialist for the city of Dubuque, “the incline of the curve is getting steeper all the time.” Corrigan added, “The pandemic is definitely not over. In fact, we’ve seen increasing cases since the first part of April here in Dubuque County and generally in Iowa.”

Corrigan also said that is hard to compare this most recent surge to those in the past when data was more comprehensive. “The thing to remember about the reported cases is they’re only a fraction of the cases really occurring out there because many people are doing rapid in-home testing, and those are not reportable...It’s hard to compare with previous surges when all cases were reported.”

Jane Harney lives in Cedar Rapids and is one of those Iowans who recently got COVID-19. Her case wouldn’t be represented in the state data, though, because she did use an at-home test. She had a sore throat Sunday and took a test Tuesday, which came back negative. She tested again Thursday and was positive.

Harney said she was “grateful” she got COVID two years into the pandemic, as opposed to earlier, like her daughter. “My oldest daughter who’s a student at Iowa, got it the first summer in the pandemic because she got it June of 2020. We kind of call that old school COVID you know—no vaccines, no therapeutics. It was just, kind of, well, if you start to get short of breath, go to the ER.”

She said her case two years later was “far different.” “I knew I was vaccinated and boosted and so many people I’d known had already had it and gotten along okay.”

Adam Orton also lives in Cedar Rapids. He is immunocompromised. He recently contracted COVID-19 for the second time. He said he and his family went to Kansas City over Memorial Day weekend and afterward he and his sons were sick. “Eventually it got to the point on Sunday where I had to go to the emergency room because my oxygen saturation level was down to 90 and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m having trouble breathing and my legs are feeling numb’ and so it was a little terrifying.”

“You know, at that point, I didn’t know what to expect,” said Orton. “Because having it the second time, you would have figured it wouldn’t have been as worse as the first time. And the first time wasn’t that bad.”

Corrigan said COVID-19 was not seasonal and, even two years into the pandemic, unpredictable. “I don’t believe we have enough knowledge to predict the future...You know we’ve had waves that have come periodically. Those may be able to be predicted, but it’s not something I’m willing to do.”

“The mystery of COVID-19 and the virus is that we don’t, we can’t predict how it will affect individual people,” said Corrigan.

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