Hawkeye Reporter

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to surge throughout the country, with the omicron variant as the dominant strain, and this includes Iowa which has seen its positivity rate and hospitalizations continue to rise.

There are 923 COVID-19 patients in hospitals, which is up from Monday’s number of 886, according to data through coronavirus.iowa.gov. This puts the state where it was in December 2020 as far as hospitalizations go. There are also 178 patients with COVID-19 in intensive care and over the last seven days there have been 182 deaths. There have been 176 patients with coronavirus admitted to hospitals in the last 24 hours. These figures are updated on the website on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 

The Iowa Department of Public Health is urging people to get vaccinated. Those who are not fully vaccinated account for 78.9% of patients in intensive care, and 72.6% of total patients hospitalized for COVID-19.

“COVID-19 vaccine protection lessens over time,” Iowa Department of Public Health tweeted. “Get a booster to increase your protection from COVID-19, including the omicron variant.”

Positive tests have skyrocketed recently and they are up 21.2% over the past 14 days. This is a huge difference from a week ago when it was at 17.5% after jumping from 14.9%. There were only 24,935 positive coronavirus tests reported over a week’s span, compared to 34,258 cases on Jan. 12, according to a Jan. 7 report by WHO13. There have been 682,570 total positive cases reported.

The report added that long term care outbreaks have also jumped to 41 from 27 in that same timeframe. An outbreak is when there are at least three positive cases detected within a 14-day period.

The report showed that 70.6% of adults have been fully vaccinated and 74.8% of people 12 years old and up have at least one dose. There have been 4,717,911 vaccine doses administered.

A total of 8,201 people have now died of COVID-19 in Iowa.