Gazette Daily News Briefing, January 17
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Tuesday, January 17.
The weather will return to a more normal state on Tuesday. According to the National Weather Service it will be cloudy with a high near 39 degrees on Tuesday. A west wind of 15 mph could gust as high as 25 mph. On Tuesday night it will be mostly cloudy, with a low of around 29 degrees.
As mentioned, the weather was a bit weird on Monday, as you probably noticed.
A tornado touched down near Williamsburg Monday — the first time the state has seen a January tornado in more than 50 years.
The tornado was reported on the ground at 2:01 p.m. and traveled northeast, prompting warnings across a swath of Eastern Iowa. It was cleared within a couple of hours, according to Tom Phillip, a meteorologist with the Quad Cities National Weather Service Office.
The tornado warning area covered parts of Benton, Johnson, Jones, Linn and Iowa Counties. The exact path of the tornado hasn’t been determined yet, but Phillip said the NWS office will be releasing more information when it’s available. No injuries have been reported.
This is the first tornado Iowa has seen in January since Jan. 24, 1967, Phillip said.
In addition to the tornado, there were reports of hail in Eastern Iowa, including 1 inch in Homestead, and 3/4 of an inch near Shueyville. Quarter-inch hail was reported in Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, Lisbon and Manchester.
Temperatures across Iowa were unseasonably warm Monday. The normal high temperature is usually around 27 degrees, but according to the National Weather Service, Cedar Rapids saw a high of 50 degrees on Monday.
We’re entering into the phase of Covid-19 where we can compare different generations of vaccines to each other.
Although just 39 percent of Americans 65 and older have had both the initial COVID vaccine series plus an updated bivalent booster against the omicron strain, new University of Iowa-involved research shows “significant protection” from that bivalent shot among those older adults.
Specifically, Americans in that older age range who got the updated booster were found to be 84 percent less likely to be hospitalized with COVD than unvaccinated people and 73 percent less likely to be hospitalized than those who were vaccinated to some degree — but not with the bivalent booster, according to research published Dec. 30 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nationally, over 400,000 COVID cases were reported for the week Jan. 11 — up from weekly counts in the 200,000s in October and November and from weekly counts under 200,000 last March and April. Weekly COVID deaths nationally jumped to 3,907 on Jan. 11, up from 2,705 the week prior.
A man fatally shot last week while breaking and entering had previously lived in the house he was breaking into, according to court documents.
Patrick M. O’Brine, 30, was shot by a man living in a home in the 300 block of South Sycamore Street in Monticello. The man called 911 at 1:48 a.m. Wednesday to report that someone was attempting to break into the house, where he was home with a 10-year-old child, according to a news release from the Monticello Police Department.
Before law enforcement arrived, the man shot O’Brine, who had managed to get into the house and confronted him. The man and the child were not harmed.
A petition for custody of minor children filed in Jones County Court by O’Brine in September states that O’Brine previously lived at the house on South Sycamore Street with the mother of his children, though O’Brine and the woman in question had both since moved before the shooting.
