Three New Outbreaks at Iowa Longterm Care Facilities

By Nikoel Hytrek

April 14, 2020

Today, Gov. Kim Reynolds announced three new outbreaks at long-term care facilities in Iowa.

Cases in these facilities account for the majority of deaths due to the coronavirus in Iowa, about 53 percent.

Reynolds said two of these facilities are in Polk County and the other is in Bremer County. The facilites are: Bartels Lutheran Retirement in Waverly, Trinity Center At Luther Park in Des Moines and On With Life in Ankeny.

A Twitter user managed to screenshot the numbers on the Iowa Department of Public Health’s website before it crashed. Six positive cases were found at Bartels Lutheran Retirement, six cases were in Trinity Center At Luther Park and 22 cases were found at On With Life.

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The number of outbreaks at long-term care facilities is one of the four factors being used to determine whether a region of Iowa should be ordered to shelter in place. The others are: hospitalization rate, percent of a region’s population that’s older than 65 and the rate of positive cases per 100,000 people in a region.

So far, no region in Iowa has reached the threshold for a shelter-in-place order, meaning the whole state has been abiding by mitigation strategies like social distancing and the closure of schools and non-essential businesses.

Other long-term care facilities with positive cases include:

Heritage Specialty Care in Linn County with 102 cases
Premier Estates of Toledo in Tama County with 47 cases
McCreedy Home in Washington County with 19 cases

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Iowa now has 189 more cases for a total of 1,899. Of those, 86 have been attributed to the outbreak at the Tyson Foods plant in Columbus Junction that suspended its operations a week ago. Six more people in the state have died.

by Nikoel Hytrek
Posted 4/14/20

Nikoel Hytrek

Nikoel Hytrek is Iowa Starting Line’s longest-serving reporter. She covers LGBTQ issues, abortion rights and all topics of interest to Iowans. Her biggest goal is to help connect the dots between policy and people’s real lives. If you have story ideas or tips, send them over to [email protected].

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