Washington County now has over 300 COVID-19 confirmed cases. According to Washington County Public Health Director Danielle Pettit-Majewski, as of Tuesday Washington County has had 307 positive cases and 11 deaths. She said currently there are 24 active cases locally.

She added that this week there may be an increase in the overall number of hospitalized patients due to Monday’s severe storm, “So if somebody has lost power, there’s a lot of MOUs, or memorandums of understanding that could be in place where if residents that are maybe in isolation in their nursing home with COVID, because we see nursing home outbreaks, they need to be transferred to a hospital because maybe their long term care has lost power or is no longer able to be a safe place for them to be. And so that could skew the numbers temporarily.”

According to the Iowa Department of Public Health the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients increased from 224 on Monday to 244 on Tuesday. Of those hospitalized patients, 64 were in intensive care and 25 were on ventilators.