Northwest Iowa — At the beginning of the pandemic, people were asked to follow certain guidelines to help “flatten the curve.” At that time, experts told us the goal was to not overwhelm the hospitals with COVID patients.
Another metric that experts look at is how many new cases are being reported. We took a look at numbers around the four-county northwest Iowa area over the last 12 weeks, and while there is some insight to glean, the trends are not exactly clear.
O’Brien County started out the first couple of weeks with rises of four cases per week, then jumped to 12 cases the next week and spiked at 22 new cases the fourth week, and has been on a somewhat downward trend with some bumps in the road until this past week, when a rise of 18 cases over the previous week was reported.
In Sioux County, the increase-in-cases curve appears to be flattening somewhat. Their numbers are higher, but they have a larger population. The first week’s rise was 62 cases. They took a dip the next week with 26, and then spiked at 89 the next week, and have been following a general downward trend since then, and have been at the low of 26 new cases per week for the last two weeks.
Osceola County had one big spike, but has been doing pretty well. In the first week, there was a rise of five cases over the previous week. It dipped to two the next week, and 4 the week after that before a big spike in week four of 13 new cases. But, for the next two weeks, there were zero new cases before jumping to 8 new cases for two weeks, then 5 new cases for each of the next two weeks, then two, then one.
The news is a little harder to determine in Lyon County. They stayed pretty low at 5 or fewer new cases per week for the first five weeks, then six, then two. But then they started a rise and had 10 new cases in week 8, 16 in week 9, and 23 in week 10. Since then, it’s gone down a little with 9 in week 11 and 10 in week 12.
The 14-day percent positive stats seem to bear out these trends somewhat as well. Lyon County seems to be reporting the highest percentage in our area of new positive tests in the last two weeks, at 14 percent. Sioux County is close behind at 12, and Osceola is right behind at 11 percent. In O’Brien County, just 7 percent of tests in the last two weeks have come back positive.
Lyon County is tied with two other counties for sixth-highest percentage per county in the state of new positive tests in the last two weeks.
