Northwest Iowa — There’s a mixed bag of good and bad news in this week’s COVID report from the Iowa Department of Public Health.
We had seen zero deaths from COVID-related illnesses in the past two week’s reports for the four-county area of Lyon, O’Brien, Sioux and Osceola. Sadly there is one additional death to report in this week’s information. The death is that of a Sioux County resident, and brings that county’s COVID death toll to 74. O’Brien County remains at 56, Osceola at 16 and Lyon at 41 deaths since the pandemic began last year. The four-county total is now 187.
Despite the tragedy of deaths in the area, the number and percentage of positive tests in the four-county area are still headed in the right direction. The number of positive tests in Sioux County in the past seven days was 18, that’s down one from last week. Sioux County’s positive percentage was 3% for the second consecutive week. O’Brien County reports 8 positive tests in the past seven days, down from 11 in last week’s report, and the positive percentage is also down in O’Brien County from 4% to 3%. Lyon County dropped from 13 positive tests last week to 6 this week, with their positive rate dropping from 7% to 2%. And in Osceola County, they report just 1 new positive test, that’s down from 11 the week before, while their positive percentage dropped from 6% to just 1%. Total number of positive tests results in the four-county area in the past seven days is 33, down from 54 in the previous week.
More good news on the statewide level: as of early Monday afternoon there were NO COVID outbreaks reported at any long-term care facility anywhere in the state of Iowa.
