Gazette Daily News Briefing, March 5
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Friday, March 5.
Friday’s weather will be close to Thursday’s, without all of the morning fog. According to the National Weather Service it should be mostly sunny in the Cedar Rapids area, with a high near 43 degrees. On Friday night it will be mostly cloudy, with a low of about 24 degrees. It’s just going to get warmer this weekend into next week, where the high temperatures will climb into the 50s and 60s.
More than 100 Northwest Junior High School students — about 15 percent of the student body — are in quarantine, after four students and a staff member tested positive for COVID-19.
In an email to families Wednesday, Northwest Principal Elizabeth Bruening said that four students and a staff member tested positive for COVID-19 and were contagious while at school.
As of Thursday morning, all schools in the Iowa City Community School District were reporting a total of 91 students and eight staff currently positive for COVID-19, and 325 students and 15 staff in quarantine from exposure to the disease. Iowa City schools are following quarantine guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Students in close contact with a positive COVID-19 case, even if both people are wearing masks, will be quarantined.
Iowa registered more than 50,000 total unemployment claims the week of Feb. 21 for the ninth consecutive week, according to data released Thursday by the Iowa Workforce Development.
New claims dropped from 5,192 to 4,452 while continuing claims rose from 48,758 to 49,140.
About 37.8 percent of claims were related to coronavirus, according to IWD. The agency typically sees higher unemployment numbers between November and February due to seasonal layoffs.
Iowa on Thursday reported 567 new COVID-19 cases and 35 new, confirmed deaths.
The new numbers bring the state’s total number of virus cases to 338,161 and the number of deaths to 5,536 since last March, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health. Vaccinations for the disease are slowly progressing, with 351,568 individuals having received one dose of the two-dose series statewide, while 208,429 are fully vaccinated.
The Iowa Legislature concluded its funnel week, determining which bills will go on to potentially become law, while others ended their journeys on Thursday. We have a full list of the bills that made it and those that didn’t on thegazette.com, but if you want a summary of what has happened so far, it is that Republicans have firm control of the House and the Senate and they got most of what they wanted either passed already or on to the next stage of debate. Expect more bills expanding gun ownership rights, bills aimed at protecting free speech, particularly conservative ideology, in schools and on social media, while also limiting the ability of school to teach about diversity and systemic racism.
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