Gazette Daily News, February 2
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for February 2.
Tuesday’s weather is going to be pretty...boring. And you know what? Great.
According to the National Weather Service it will be partly sunny in the Cedar Rapids area with a high near 28 degrees and a gentle wind. Tuesday night it will be mostly cloudy, with a low of around 14. As an aside, it looks like it will be super cold at the end of the week, so enjoy the next few days of not being there, yet.
Three cases of a new, more-contagious variant of COVID-19 have been confirmed in Iowa, with two of those cases in Johnson County, the Iowa Department of Public Health confirmed on Monday.
The SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 variant, often referred to as the U.K. variant because it was first found in the United Kingdom, spreads more easily than the original strain. However, COVID-19 vaccines now being deployed in Iowa, albeit slowly, are considered effective against it.
Two cases of the U.K. variant were identified in Johnson County, one in an adult identified as between the ages of 18 to 40 and another in an adult age of 41 to 60. Another adult case was in Bremer County.
University of Iowa Health Care on Monday morning officially began collecting names of community members wanting a COVID-19 vaccine — propelling the hospital system into its next vaccination phase after the campus, following state guidance, vaccinated its thousands of hospital and clinic employees.
The campus is keeping back enough vaccine to ensure all its workers receive the two required doses of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine. But UIHC last month received permission from the Iowa Department of Public Health to start administering community doses in February.
Community members, as of Monday, can sign up for the vaccine doses via the MyChart electronic medical record system or through a website portal for those who don’t use MyChart.
According to the Associated Press, a Democratic-led House panel is launching a probe into COVID-19 outbreaks at meatpacking plants and whether federal and state governments properly enforced safety rules. .
Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., chairman of the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, sent letters Monday to Tyson Foods — which has facilities in Waterloo — Smithfield Foods and JBS USA requesting information on the number of sick employees, facility closures, safety measures and leave policies for when workers tested positive.
Clyburn said in the letter that nearly 54,000 workers at 569 meatpacking plants in the United States have tested positive for the coronavirus during the pandemic, and at least 270 of those workers have died.
This briefing is sponsored in part by Corridor Careers. Are you looking for a job? CorridorCareers.com is a resource to local job seekers where they can get job tips, sign up for local job alerts, build a resume and more. Check it out at CorridorCareers.com.
Be sure to subscribe to The Gazette Daily news podcast, or just tell your Amazon Alexa enabled device to “enable The Gazette Daily News skill" so you can get your daily briefing by simply saying “Alexa, what’s the news?"
If you prefer podcasts, you can also find us on iTunes.
