Coronavirus Update – April 14, 2020

Good morning. First of all, I want to apologize for the delay, we have had a large volume of that's been using the new website and we didn't have the processing power that we needed, so they are working on that and it should be ready to go later this afternoon. So, we'll go ahead and start with an update on the numbers. We had 189 new positive cases today for a total of 1,899 positive cases. We had no new counties, so we stand at 82 total counties in the state. We have 481 negative cases today for a total of 17,467 negative tests. The State Hygienic Lab has 3,415 tests available. We had a 163 hospitalized as of last evening. 790 Iowans have recovered for a recovery rate of 42% and I'm very sorry to report that we have had six additional deaths for a total of 49 deaths in the state of Iowa.

So, today's positive case count is the highest that we've seen and I want to explain a little bit of why that number is so high. As we as you're aware of a Tyson plant in Louisa County has experienced an outbreak of COVID-19 among its employees and public health has been working closely with management at the plant to test their staff. Yesterday the State Hygienic Lab confirmed an additional 86 positive cases related to the outbreak at the facility. So, of today's total 189 positive cases, 86 of those are related to the Tyson outbreak. The Department of Public Health has also confirmed that we have three additional outbreaks in long-term care facilities: Bartlett Bartels in Lutheran retirement home in Bremer County, Trinity Center at Lutheran Park in Polk County, and On With Life, a residential facility located in Polk County. The Department of Public Health and the local public health officials are working with the management and staff at the facilities to ensure that all steps are being taken to make sure that we isolate sick residents, assign dedicated staff members to provide their care and monitor all other residents.

On the day that I announced the first positive COVID-19 cases, I pledged to keep Iowans informed and to be as transparent as possible. I began providing daily updates of confirmed cases by age group and county and later provided the same information for deaths, then as new information became available over the course of the last several weeks we have continued to expand the updates to include additional information such as the number of Iowans who are hospitalized, those who have recovered and our overall recovery rate. Last week I reported new information from Iowa’s six RMCC regions about hospitalizations, bed capacity, ICU availability and vent availability as well. And this was all done to facilitate critical information sharing and coordinating healthcare resources within a region or across the state during this crisis. Our goal from the beginning has been to provide Iowans with the information that they need so that they can understand the current situation and what it means for them.

So today I’m pleased to share that we're making more information available and more accessible with the launch of a dashboard on our website coronavirus.iowa.gov. The dashboard includes the numbers that I report in my press conference each day and more, such as the total number of people tested and recovered in each county, the total positive cases by county and age group, the COVID-19 assessment levels for each region, and Iowa's epidemiologic curve. Dr. Pedati is joining me today to give you an overview of the EPI curve but first I want to give you a quick tour of the dashboard and the information that you'll find there. And the dashboard will be available later today on the homepage again coronavirus.iowa.gov, just scroll down until you see it.

So, the first page of the dashboard shows current status where you'll see the statewide totals for confirmed cases, deaths, people tested, and cases recovered. You can hover over any county on the map to see the county name, the number of confirmed cases, and the number of deaths, if you click on the county, you'll see even more information including the number of people tested and recovered in that county. You can also access some of the same information in tables so that you can see more results at once including cases, and deaths by county and cases by county and age. Lab testing provides the number of individuals tested and the test results for each day. So, again, if you hover or click on any bar on the graph to see the number of positive test results, in red, and the negative test results in gray. The demographics tab provides additional information about the Iowans who have tested positive for COVID-19 including gender, age group, race and ethnicity. The long-term care dashboard identifies the facilities with confirmed COVID-19 outbreaks and includes the number of positive cases among both residents and staff of those facilities. The RMCC dashboard provides the information about hospitalization and resources that we’ve been sharing since last week. The information you see at first is a daily roll up of all regions but you can click on any region to see its data for the day. And finally, we have also included the regional assessment map showing which level each county currently ranks. And now I'd like Dr. Pedati to share the EPI curve and provide an overview of what it tells us about the current status.

[Dr. Pedati speaks]

Thank you, Dr. Pedati. And I want to again express my gratitude to you and your team for your leadership and expertise throughout the last several weeks. The effort that you have put forth in your team is remarkable and I was very fortunate to have the team that we do. I also again want to thank our local public health officials in each of our counties, the role is so important - their role to understanding the situation in communities and protecting the health of Iowans - so please know how much you are appreciated as well. And with that we’ll go ahead and open it up for questions.

Reynolds, K.K. [KMTV 3 News Now]. (2020, April 14). Gov. Reynolds Provides Coronavirus Update 4/14/20 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAnSIbGU-vw] Retrieved on February 14, 2022 from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0duMiBZmDlbUue0eqd0htw.