Governor Kim Reynolds has enacted three rounds of reopening businesses and venues across Iowa this month already, and bars are next in line to resume indoor service on May 28. The governor has argued, “We have to move forward” as we “learn to live with” having novel coronavirus in our communities.

However, the judicial branch is approaching the COVID-19 pandemic more cautiously. Under an order Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Susan Christensen issued on May 22, in-person bench trials will remain on hold until July 13, and jury trials won’t resume in Iowa until September 14.

Herb Strentz reflects on some older quotes about politics and a recent comment by Governor Kim Reynolds at a news conference. -promoted by Laura Belin

It is both odd and instructive how the written word can bring the light of clarity and the spoken word the fog of obfuscation.

That came to mind while piecing together a sort of quilt of quotes relevant to the nation’s and Iowa’s responses to COVID-19.

Bruce Lear: Teachers need support from policy-makers, and public schools need federal assistance in order to guarantee a safe and healthy environment for children in the fall. -promoted by Laura Belin

Teaching and singing the national anthem have a few things in common. Both are really hard to do, and someone who knows how can make it look easy enough for anyone to do it. But not everyone can.

If you don’t believe me, try remembering where those bombs burst, and try hitting that high note on key at the end. It’s not easy, just like parents forced to teach at home are discovering about teaching even one or two kids.

Yes, real teaching is really hard.

UPDATE: Hours after this piece was published, the plus/minus feature disappeared from the state website. Original post follows.

The state of Iowa’s official website for information about the novel coronavirus pandemic incorporated a few tweaks this week. The most noticeable: Department of Public Health staff update various statistics throughout the day, rather than once in each 24-hour period. During her May 18 news conference, Governor Kim Reynolds asserted that the new practice would make data on COVID-19 more “transparent.” Critics pointed out that the frequent updates would make it harder for Iowans to keep tabs on daily changes in coronavirus cases, tests, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Reynolds didn’t announce another addition to the website, which has attracted relatively little notice. Several of the bar graphs can now be adjusted to project the number of daily cases, tests, hospitalizations, or deaths weeks or months into the future.

The trouble is, those projections are not grounded in any principles of epidemiology.

State Representative Jo Oldson is the Iowa House minority whip. -promoted by Laura Belin

For weeks, Governor Kim Reynolds kept secret two pandemic reports that she requested from public health experts at the University of Iowa. When she finally released them after growing public pressure, it became clear why she hid them: the experts she hired disagreed with her and warned her about loosening public measures too soon.

Less than two months after Iowa recorded its first death attributed to novel coronavirus, the number of reported COVID-19 deaths in the state reached 404 on May 21, surpassing the highest number of annual fatalities in Iowa vehicle crashes over the past decade.

Two strong candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in a top-targeted Iowa House seat.

Today’s featured Iowa native is a woody shrub rather than a wildflower, and it’s far from the most beautiful plant blooming on my block right now. But Fragrant sumac (Rhus aromatica) is a hardy plant and good option to consider for landscaping, especially if you need something deer won’t destroy. We had these bushes planted some years ago to replace non-native shrubs (if I recall correctly, they were the highly invasive honeysuckle). They’ve survived tough winters, and the deer we see frequently in this corner of Windsor Heights don’t care for the foliage.

Fragrant sumac is native to almost all of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. According to the Illinois Wildflowers site, it thrives in “full or partial sun, dry conditions, and soil that is sandy or rocky. However, this shrub will adapt to mesic conditions with fertile loamy soil if there is not too much competition from other species of plants.” Small bees or flies will visit the flowers.

No court will ever consider the merits of two challenges to a 2019 law that changed Iowa’s judicial selection process and shortened the chief justice’s term.

The Iowa Department of Public Health does not intend to limit the use of exemptions to mandatory vaccinations during the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, spokesperson Amy McCoy confirmed on May 19.

The State Hygienic Laboratory has expanded its novel coronavirus testing criteria to include some children and staff in day care centers who have respiratory symptoms and no alternative diagnosis.

However, the state still will not cover COVID-19 tests for most people living in the same household with someone confirmed to have the virus.

State Auditor Rob Sand is examining the no-bid contracts Iowa has signed to procure personal protective equipment (PPE), which has been in short supply across the country during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

A one-sentence statement released by the State Auditor’s Office on May 18 quoted Sand as saying, “Prior to last week’s coverage of a vendor whom has never before sold PPE receiving a $7 million no-bid contract for PPE, we had already begun collecting information about both no-bid contracts and the state’s PPE supply.”

For the fourth time in less than two months, President Donald Trump has fired an inspector general who had stirred up trouble for him or his political allies.

Iowa’s senior Senator Chuck Grassley has championed whistleblowers and inspectors general for decades. Yet just like last month, he declined to condemn Trump’s retaliatory move. Grassley didn’t mention State Department Inspector General Steve Linick’s dismissal on his widely-viewed Twitter feed this weekend. Meanwhile, his office released a statement that dinged Linick for not looking into “the State Department’s role in advancing the debunked Russian collusion investigation.”

Ira Lacher: “For better, or God forbid, much worse, America has decided on a path: Reopen, urge common-sense caution, and come what may.” -promoted by Laura Belin

My friend’s daughter caught COVID-19. Experiencing high fever and labored breathing, she visited an emergency room of a New York City hospital, where she spent several days in intensive care, before finally being allowed to go home, where milder symptoms continued for weeks. But physical symptoms gave way to mental health symptoms, specifically, severe panic. Those same symptoms have befallen her father, hundreds of miles away from her.

The effects of the pandemic have been duly reported: physical symptoms, sometimes leading to death; economic symptoms, careering the world toward financial collapse; societal symptoms, including increasing disregard for civil authority. Now, the United Nations is adding another effect: mental health symptoms.

Racial disparities continue to widen as the number of novel coronavirus cases grows in Iowa.

Data published on the state’s COVID-19 website on May 17 indicate that Latinos make up 25.1 percent of Iowa’s 14,651 confirmed COVID-19 cases. That’s more than four times the share of Latinos in the state population (6.2 percent according to the latest Census Bureau estimate).

Another 57.1 of Iowans who have tested positive are not Hispanic or Latino, while the remaining 17.8 percent of cases are pending further investigation of the person’s ethnicity.

Susan Nelson of Floyd County offers a great tutorial on how to make a face shield, which is more protective than a cloth mask. -promoted by Laura Belin

“Remember when the public health community and all ID docs said we could eliminate HIV with testing and contact tracing and we didn’t need to distribute and encourage condom use? Me neither #FaceShieldsForAll” ~ @eliowa

I am going to show you how to make a face shield that costs a couple of dollars, but first I’ll explain why you should want one.

An essay by Herb Strentz inspired by Caliban, “the original strange bedfellow.” -promoted by Laura Belin

As we approach Iowa’s primary election on June 2, here and elsewhere, Republican and Democratic Party slates often reflect the observation “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”

The “bedfellows” adage goes back more than 400 years, attributed to Act 2 Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which premiered in 161l, probably in The Globe Theatre.

Iowa’s two first-term members of the U.S. House were among fourteen Democrats to oppose the latest bill drafted to address the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The so-called HEROES Act cleared the lower chamber on May 15 by 208 votes to 199 (roll call). It called for an estimated $3 trillion in spending, including “nearly $1 trillion in aid to battered states, cities and Native American tribes, and another round of bolstered jobless benefits and direct government payments to Americans.”

Republicans in control of the U.S. Senate oppose the bill, so its passage in the House serves primarily to communicate preferred Democratic policy.

Days after announcing the Test Iowa program last month, Governor Kim Reynolds described the expanded capacity to test for coronavirus infections as a “significant advantage” for Iowa compared to other states, and a “tool that allows us to make evidence-based decisions about how to mitigate and manage the virus with precision.”

The governor revealed on May 14 that only a few thousand Iowans had been tested for COVID-19 through a program that was supposed to provide 3,000 tests a day.

Staff at Iowa’s State Hygienic Laboratory have been working around the clock to process tests that reveal the scope of the novel coronavirus epidemic. Governor Kim Reynolds has often lauded their “yeoman’s work” at her daily news conferences.

But as former Vice President Joe Biden famously said, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” In real terms, state support for a facility critical to Iowa’s COVID-19 response dropped considerably over the last decade.

The Iowa legislature hasn’t increased dollars allocated to the State Hygienic Lab since 2013, when Senate Democrats insisted on doing so. Not only has state funding failed to keep up with inflation since then, the laboratory’s annual appropriation has yet to recover from a mid-year budget cut in 2018.