DES MOINES, Iowa (KCRG) – The total number of people who died from the new coronavirus in Iowa rose above 3,900 on Saturday morning, according to state data, as the number of people tested dropped during the holidays.
At 10:30 a.m. 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 closed for parts of the New Year holiday. This was likely a contributing factor to the reduced number of positive tests and the smaller number of tests overall. A similar drop in the number of tests, compared to other days, was seen around Thanksgiving in late November.
Another 48 people who died from COVID-19 were added to Iowa’s total, which is 3,946 people since the start of the pandemic.
The number of people hospitalized in Iowa for the disease was 572 Saturday morning, a net decrease of three. 119 of those people were in intensive care, a net increase of two. 60 of those patients require the use of a ventilator, a net decrease of three. 88 additional people were admitted to Iowa hospitals during the 24-hour reporting period, a percentage consistent with data from the past few days.
Another 2,056 people had reported test results by public and private laboratories in the past 24 hours, a significantly lower number than in the past few days. The positivity rate for these batch of tests was 34.5%, lower than the 46.1% from the previous day. The positivity rate calculated with 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 repeatedly.
A total of 1,361,710 people in Iowa have been tested since the start of the pandemic.
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