Four dozen dead from COVID-19 added to Iowa total as tests show vacation slowing



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DES MOINES, Iowa (KCRG) – The total number of people who have died from the novel coronavirus in Iowa has exceeded 3,900, state data showed as of Saturday morning, as the number of people tested declined for the holidays.

At 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, the Iowa Department of Public Health said 709 people who tested positive for COVID-19 were added to the state’s total, which now stands at 283,144 people. 243,218 people are considered to have recovered from the disease.

TestIowa, the state-run testing program, was shut down for part of the New Year’s holidays. This likely contributed to the reduced number of people who tested positive and the smaller number of tests overall. A similar drop in testing, compared to other days, was seen near the Thanksgiving holiday in late November.

48 more people who died from COVID-19 have been added to Iowa’s total, or 3,946 people since the start of the pandemic.

The number of people hospitalized with the disease in Iowa was 572 as of Saturday morning, a net decrease of three. 119 of those people were in intensive care units, a net increase of two. 60 of these patients require the use of a ventilator, a net decrease of three. An additional 88 people were admitted to Iowa hospitals during the 24-hour benchmark, a rate consistent with the last few days of data.

Public and private laboratories have reported test results to 2,056 more people in the past 24 hours, a number significantly lower than in the past few days. The positivity rate for this batch of tests was 34.5%, lower than the 46.1% the day before. The positivity rate calculated using this method may differ from the number on the state’s coronavirus dashboard, due to the fact that it uses the number of people tested, not the total number of tests, including people who have been tested multiple times.

A total of 1,361,710 people in Iowa have been tested since the start of the pandemic.

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