Iowans Were Scared Into Taking the Virus Seriously
Updated at 10:28 a.m. ET on February 6, 2021.
Public-health experts predicted a tsunami of COVID-19 infections in Iowa this winter. Doctors and researchers told me in November that they expected thousands of Iowans to travel to visit family over Thanksgiving and Christmas. They worried that people would continue to pack into crowded bars and go maskless in public, and they thought that, by January, the state’s hospitals would be overrun with patients—by New Year’s, as many as 80 Iowans could be dying every day.
But Iowa, unlike other states, did not experience this post-holiday apocalypse. Iowa’s cases have actually been on a relatively consistent decline since just before Thanksgiving. So what happened?
The answer is not clear-cut, because the course of any pandemic is influenced by a
