SIOUX CITY — After watching COVID-19 cases climb steadily for weeks, health officials breathed a collective sigh of relief in June.
Throughout May and June, Iowa’s 14-day rolling total of active cases declined from a high of 7,342 active statewide cases on May 6. The number dipped slightly under 4,000 by mid June, but in recent weeks highly populated counties such as Polk, Johnson, Webster, Cerro Gordo, Dubuque and Linn have fueled an increase in infection rates, pushing Iowa’s totals back above 6,000 and causing renewed alerts that the coronavirus pandemic was far from over.
Yet Iowa Department of Public Health data that tracks COVID-19 in each of Iowa’s 99 counties shows the rate of new cases dropping throughout much of this corner of the state. While the state’s overall graph showing total active cases has turned upward, for much of July numbers have gone in the opposite direction across most of Siouxland.
The overall number of cases continues to climb, of course, but telling figures such as number of new cases, the number of currently active cases and the percentage of tests that come back positive have declined. Most of those numbers have dropped while the number of tests being done has remained steady.