IowaWatch (https://caucus.iowawatch.org/tag/podcast/)
Jesse Espinoza has seen COVID-19 up close in more than one way. His story, in his words, in the last installment of our series on the voices of COVID-19 in Iowa.
Lilly Olson was pregnant when dealing with hospital patients suffering from COVID-19, and at a time when healthcare professionals were climbing a learning curve for treating the people with the virus. She feared for what the virus could do to her family, including her unborn child.
On a normal day, helping sick people cope with the most serious, life-threatening illnesses is a given at the medical intensive care unit at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Lung failure, liver failure, kidney failure – the list goes on. Dr. Gregory Schmidt sees a little more than a dozen of these patients during morning rounds, then works with other healthcare givers at the hospital to map a plan to save each person’s life.
Kirstin Brainard’s daily rounds as a floor nurse at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics’ medical intensive care unit are a mix of reviewing how patients have done the past 24 hours, helping treat those patients and taking new admissions. Brainard is part of an 8-person team, which has to be ready to deal with any emergency on the hospital floor.
Some rural Iowa hospitals will not survive the COVID-19 outbreak, industry leaders said Wednesday. That dire warning came as the Iowa Hospital Association revealed projections that show the state’s 118 hospitals, collectively, could lose as much as $2.17 billion in revenue by the end of this year.
The nation’s only president born in Iowa had a far different reputation around the world than he had in the United States. Such was the fate for Herbert Hoover, who presided over the start of the Great Depresssion during his 1929-33 presidency.
Eastern Iowans interested in politics are trying to have civil conversations about this issues dividing them. They’ve joined an nationwide movement called Better Angels, a bipartisan citizen’s effort to bring Republicans and Democrats together to talk to one another in a civil manner.
One important way to ensure food security in the United States is to keep farmland ownership from going into foreign hands. That doesn’t always happen.
The federal Americans with Disabilities Act is intended to help people access public facilities, but an IowaWatch investigation shows most of our schools are not in compliance with the law.
One split second captured in a photograph defined the dramatic rescue of Patricia Ralph-Neely below Des Moines’ Center Street Dam on June 30, 2009.