On March 11, the day the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a global pandemic, Iowa seemed to think it was unassailable. News stories had filtered into the state. We had our first confirmed case on March 8, but the virus itself felt distant.
We had a shitshow of a caucus only a month before, and Super Tuesday was still a recent memory. The thing about living in the middle of the country is that so many things pass over you: Trendy apps don’t make it out until years later; Broadway shows skip us on tour; bands only come to town when they are still scrambling for relevance. Once the political candidates clear out, we go back to being confused with Idaho and Ohio. After all, we had only 54 cases of West Nile, so maybe we’d be okay.
At that moment, the virus felt like an abstraction, even though it was already here. By mid-March, Linn County, where I live, would become the county with the most confirmed cases of the virus in Iowa. Then it was quickly outpaced by Polk and Black Hawk counties because of outbreaks at senior care centers and food processing plants. The state’s most vulnerable, numbers on a chart. Growing until now, when Iowa is the state with the fastest-growing number of cases of Covid-19.
But on March 11, the whole state had 14 confirmed cases, all tied to an Egyptian cruise along the Nile sponsored by a local bank. Our local leaders didn’t seem too worried. One county supervisor was on the road with the Bernie Sanders campaign; another left that day for a vacation with his family to New Zealand. Life in Iowa in mid-March felt like watching your toddler walk along the edge of the water. Maybe he’d fall and be okay, maybe he wouldn’t be okay, or maybe he wouldn’t fall.
That morning of March 11, I emailed my co-workers at the Cedar Rapids Gazette suggesting we cancel an event we were supposed to have in two days. Everyone was on the fence. Some argued for personal responsibility. (“People can choose for themselves,” wrote one colleague.) Another noted it was a smaller event, probably under 50 attendees, and there was nothing to worry about.
“What looks like an overreaction now may look smarter in the long run,” counseled our editorial page director, who had just canceled his spring break trip with his family to Florida. Minutes after he sent that email, the city of Cedar Rapids canceled its St. Patrick’s Day parade.
After that, events began to be canceled across the state — except when they weren’t. Iowa City urged bars and restaurants to close. But that weekend, Iowa high schools still held their state basketball tournament. I canceled my daughter’s ninth birthday party on March 21; at about the same time, a friend emailed to say that his daughter’s birthday was still on and that it would be fine since they’d be practicing social distancing. On March 16, Gov. Kim Reynolds refused to close bars and restaurants but encouraged Iowans to order takeout. The next day, though, she signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency. Iowa had fallen.
Except we hadn’t. After the emergency declaration, the governor soft-pedaled, refusing to issue a stay-at-home order. For some people, life changed dramatically — my employer was proactive in making sure people worked from home — but others took longer. Collins Aerospace, a global company headquartered in Cedar Rapids with offices around the world, didn’t mandate its employees to work from home until a full week after an employee tested positive for the virus.
You can’t blame Iowans for being confused. Our governor issued an order stating that all gatherings with 10 or more people should be canceled but then allowed a horse auction in northeast Iowa to continue: It drew more than 600 people. Afterwards, Reynolds issued an order that said only 10 people could be present at an auction — unless it’s for food animals, in which case it could have up to 25 attendees.
When Iowa reached a critical level of cases during the week of April 6, with the virus in 75 of 99 counties and nearly 1,000 cases statewide, instead of issuing a stay-at-home order, the governor closed shopping malls, bowling alleys, golf courses, amusement parts, and other places of entertainment. “We are doing everything we can,” Reynolds said repeatedly, without issuing a stay-at-home order. Meatpacking plants, which are now the center of virus activity in Iowa, for the most part remained open. By April 12, Smithfield’s plant in Sioux Falls would have more than 200 cases.
In a state with no stay-at-home order, the divide between who takes the virus seriously and who doesn’t is evident simply by walking through your neighborhood. I’ve seen neighbors congregating on lawns, chatting, while other neighbors in masks furiously glare at them. One Sunday, a woman two blocks down from me was filming unmasked people as they ran and walked by. In the grocery stores, some people wear masks, while others cluster and talk, drinking coffee and wandering the aisle like it was every April before this April.
A woman named Dee who works at a Subway in northwest Iowa calls to tell me that it’s business as usual and she’s worried about the people who come in, who aren’t social distancing. The people who work at nearby plants and warehouses. She says she feels like she’s being sacrificed to make sandwiches. I keep checking in on her for weeks. She’s still there. Still working.
Part of the divide is access to information, and that information keeps changing. If you hadn’t been paying attention to Reynolds’ news conferences every day or regularly reading local news coverage, you would have missed the switch from bars being open to everything moving to takeout. The week of April 20, Reynolds’ recommendation on masks changed from not recommending them to wearing them if you’ve got them.
The bigger divide isn’t between Iowans but between states in the Midwest. Our neighbor Minnesota has over 2.4 million more residents than Iowa; as of April 25, that state has tested 58,987 residents and has nearly 2,000 fewer cases than Iowa, which has tested almost 23,000 fewer residents. The difference: Minnesota issued a stay-at-home order on April 8.
Minnesota also recently partnered with neighboring states, joining Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to form a regional coalition to respond to the pandemic. Iowa was left out.
The reasons were unspecified, and lawmakers are instead playing a passive-aggressive game of Midwestern Nice: Pritzker says Iowa had been invited; Reynolds says didn’t say she turned them down but didn’t say she hadn’t been invited either. In response to questions, she just doesn’t answer. Instead, she says she’s in contact with the governors, but when pressed at a recent news conference, Reynolds only mentioned governors not in the coalition, such Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts and the governors of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. It’s not supposed to be. It’s a back-and-forth that belies an ideological rift in the Midwest — other states want to manage the coronavirus, while Iowa’s governor wants to forget this whole pandemic thing ever happened.
Reynolds has fallen short of full transparency on her pandemic response. She has refused to list the names of the people on her pandemic advisory team and has refused to share key information about modeling and all the data and metrics she mentions in every news conference. When a data model was leaked to an Iowa City paper, Reynolds denied that it was a full and complete data model. When asked what other data points were missing, she declined to answer. A full month after the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in Iowa, Reynolds’ office contracted with the University of Iowa to come up with a model for when the state would see its peak. That model hasn’t been released.
On April 22, the Des Moines Register reported it had “sought a copy of a pandemic emergency response plan the Iowa Department of Public Health first created more than 10 years ago. It also sought reports from the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Management regarding day-to-day actions from the state on the virus.” All those requests were denied.
What Reynolds has been up to instead is technocratic dealmaking and the willingness to cut deals with friends. While Minnesota partnered with the Mayo Clinic to test everyone in the state, Iowa chose to partner with a VC-funded tech startup out of Utah with no health care experience to test Iowans. The reason? Ashton Kutcher said it was a good idea. In lieu of issuing a stay-at-home order, Gov. Reynolds called the Cedar Rapids native and asked him to film a PSA for Iowans encouraging them to stay home. On the call, Kutcher told her about a Utah tech company that was trying to test people, because one of the company’s partners is a friend of Kutcher’s.
It would be laughable if people weren’t dying. Iowa has 15th lowest population density for a state but currently has the quickest rate of coronavirus spread in the country, a 75% increase in cases from April 16 to 23. The people being sacrificed on this altar of ideology are the immigrants, refugees, and formerly incarcerated Iowans who work in the food processing plants.
On April 24, Reynolds said she’d begin allowing elective medical procedures and the opening of farmers markets. And on Monday April 27, after the state saw its highest number of new cases over the weekend, Gov. Reynolds announced she was beginning the process of opening up a state that had never closed.
In 77 of Iowa’s 99 counties, gyms, restaurants, and fitness centers will be able to open at 50% capacity, and churches are now allowed to meet. “We hope to get in front of this and not see a huge spike in the numbers,” Reynolds said, right after a weekend where Iowa saw a huge spike in the numbers. “We can’t stop the virus. We have to learn to live with it,” she explained, a tacit acceptance that people will die because some people’s lives must continue at the costs of others.