Iowa news
COVID-19 cases continue to rise in Iowa while hospitalizations remain steady
COVID-19 hospitalizations in Iowa dipped slightly over the past week but the number of new reported COVID-19 cases continued to climb, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The state health department reported 5,924 new cases over the past seven days, or an average of about 846 cases per day. That’s an increase of more than 10% over the previous week, and the highest number reported in one week since the end of the omicron surge in early March. (Des Moines Register)
Mercy Cedar Rapids employee receives IHERF scholarship
Mercy Medical Center’s Paige Zaruba has been awarded a $3,500 scholarship from the Iowa Hospital Education and Research Foundation, which is supported by the Iowa Hospital Association. Zaruba is pursuing her BSN at Luther College in Decorah and works as a patient care technician for Mercy’s clinical decision unit when she’s on break from college. She is among 60 students from Iowa who have received assistance this year from the IHERF Health Care Careers Scholarship Program. (Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun)
Survey finds lack of understanding about what Iowa midwives do
A University of Iowa survey about nurse midwifes finds Iowans understand they deliver babies, but don’t know much else about them. The university’s Carver College of Medicine is planning to open the state’s first nurse midwife education program this fall to help fill gaps in rural areas. The goal is to help attract and retain students into the program and make people aware of the services a midwife provides. (Iowa Public Radio)
National news
More than 4 in 10 parents said they would not vaccinate their children under age 5 against COVID-19, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The findings come as vaccinations among younger children lag behind other age groups. Less than 3% of children under 5, or roughly 544,000, had received at least one dose of the vaccine as of July 20, according to a separate KFF study that analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Food and Drug Administration last month authorized the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines for children as young as 6 months. (Des Moines Register)
Data breaches cost health systems more than $10M each
The average cost of a data breach for a health care organization is $10.1 million, according to IBM’s annual cost of data breach report. This is a nearly $1 million increase from 2020. Health care organizations had the costliest breaches amongst industries for the 12th year in a row. Ransomware and destructive attacks represented 28% of breaches among critical infrastructure organizations. (Becker’s Health IT and CIO Report)
Biden admin plans to roll out updated COVID-19 booster shots in September
The Biden administration plans to offer updated COVID-19 booster shots in September. The new vaccines will be reformulated to perform better against the now dominant, and extremely contagious, omicron subvariant BA.5, and also the BA.4 subvariant. Both Pfizer and Moderna say they’ll have the retooled boosters ready by the fall, and the federal government has purchased millions of doses to allocate to the public, but it’s not enough to inoculate every American. (NBC News)