Iowa : Long-term care notes

Iowa reports long-term-care COVID-19 data only for Skilled Nursing Facilities according to outreach with Iowa's public information officers. CTP puts Skilled Nursing Facility data in the Nursing Home category in our dataset. Iowa reports cumulative and outbreak data. Iowa does provide facility-level data for Skilled Nursing Facilities. Iowa reports resident and staff data combined. Data is cumulative since March 1, 2020.

Iowa provides cumulative totals for resident deaths. Iowa occasionally provided outbreak totals for long-term-care data and cumulative case totals via email to CTP.

According to Iowa’s public information officers, the state defines an outbreak as a facility with three or more cases in a 14-day period. An outbreak ends when 14 days have passed with no new confirmed case.

Iowa provides facility-level cumulative and outbreak data for staff and resident cases for facilities with an active outbreak. Iowa removes facilities from their facility-level dashboard dataset when their outbreak becomes resolved.

On November 26, 2020, in an effort to try and provide the best estimate of cumulative cases, we began to use the highest outbreak total of cases and subtract the most recent cumulative data provided by the state health department. That difference is added to the cumulative data to best estimate a cumulative number. Because of this methodology, our estimated cumulative case total for Iowa is likely an undercount. Additionally, cumulative deaths include deaths from facilities that reported an active outbreak and those that did not report an outbreak but had one or more COVID-19 deaths.

• August 6, 2020: Iowa Department of Health provided CTP with cumulative totals, citing 2355 cumulative staff and resident cases, on July 16, 2020. CTP carried over that total until August 6, 2020.
• September 10, 2020: Iowa Department of Health provided CTP with cumulative resident and staff cases, citing 2,461 cases as of September 9, 2020.
• September 24, 2020: Iowa Department of Health provided CTP with cumulative resident and staff cases, citing 3,998 cases as of September 24, 2020.
• October 1, 2020: Iowa Department of Health provided CTP with cumulative resident and staff cases, citing 4,081 cases as of October 1, 2020.
• October 22, 2020: Iowa Department of Health provided CTP with cumulative resident positives. Previously, Iowa lumped staff and resident positives together. From this date forward, cumulative resident positives provided by Iowa are in the "resident" category and the remaining staff/resident positives will staff in the resident/staff positives category.
• October 29, 2020: Iowa Department of Health did not provide CTP with an update on cumulative resident and staff cases. CTP carried forward data from October 15, 2020.
• November 5, 2020: Iowa Department of Health provided CTP with an update on cumulative resident and staff cases.
• November 12, 2020: Iowa Department of Health did not provide CTP with an update on cumulative resident and staff cases. CTP carried forward data from November 5, 2020.
• November 19, 2020: Iowa Department of Health did not provide CTP with an update on cumulative resident and staff cases. CTP carried forward data from November 5, 2020.
• November 26, 2020: Iowa Department of Health did not provide CTP with an update on cumulative resident cases. CTP carried forward the data from November 5, 2020.
• December 17, 2020: Iowa Department of Health did not provide CTP with an update on cumulative resident cases. CTP carried forward the data from November 5, 2020.
• January 14, 2021: Iowa does not report staff/resident deaths as combined. Deaths are now reported for long-term care residents only.
• December 31, 2020 - February 11, 2021: Iowa Department of Health did not provide CTP with an update on cumulative resident cases. CTP carried forward the data from December 23, 2020.

Iowa’s long-term care data can be found here.

The state provides facility-level cumulative data. The state does not provide facility-level outbreak data. Cumulative facility-level data was first reported by the state on 2020-08-20.

Because each state reports facility-level data differently, CTP has produced a number of scripts to make the dataset as standardized and comprehensive as possible. This state uses the following scripts: post_processing, standardize_data, close_outbreaks. More information on each of these scripts can be found in our Airtable Facility Script Annotations. (https://airtable.com/shr99Ep06cplrcVg6)