South Iowa News

Like many others, a Des Moines-based public defender is nervously waiting to see whether the now-past Iowa State Fair, with its more than 1 million attendees, will turn out to be a COVID-19 super spreader event.

Wendy Samuelson, an Iowa state public defender who has been licensed to practice law for 22 years, took to social media before the state fair ended to voice her concerns.

"Des Moines, IA public schools haven’t even started yet and they had to close their administrative offices due to a COVID outbreak," Samuelson said in her Aug. 20 Twitter post. "School starts next week...after the 10 day free for all Iowa State Fair ends."

Samuelson's post was a reply to a Twitter thread started by Houston trial attorney Zach Wolfe in response to then reported 494 active COVID-19 cases in Midland Texas schools. 

"No one could have predicted this," Wolfe said in his Twitter post, apparently in sarcasm.

The Iowa State Fair reported on its website that 1,094,480 attended the fair Aug. 12-22, almost 76,000 fewer than attended the pre-COVID event in 2019. Day 10 of the fair saw the highest number of attendees, 117,764.

The fair is Iowa's largest events and one of the nation's oldest and largest agricultural and industrial expositions that attracts visitors from throughout the the Midwest, the rest of the nation and even from other countries, according to the fair's website. The fair generally ends two weeks before Labor Day.

This year's fair included a vaccine booth that attendees could visit but it saw few visitors, according to a Yahoo news story published during the fair.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 is surging in Iowa, according to information gleaned this week from the coronavirus page on the state's website.

Polk County continues to lead all other Iowa counties in COVID-19 statistics, including the most positive tests and the most deaths, now just days before the school year is set to begin.

As of Thursday, Aug. 26, Polk County has tested more than 811,000, of whom more than 70,000 tested positive. Of that number, almost 59,000 have recovered and 655 have died, according to the coronavirus page on the state's website.

That number is out of the more than 5.6 million tested in the state, of whom almost 433,000 tested positive, more than 373,000 recovered and 6,268 have died.

Polk County's COVID-19 rankings are well ahead of Linn County, where more than 811,000 have been tested, almost 25,000 tested positive, more than 21,000 have recovered and 346 have died.

In third place is Black Hawk County, where more than 259,000 have been tested, almost 20,000 tested positive, almost 17,000 have recovered and 328 have died.