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euthanize them.
The state’s curve hadn’t flattened much before Iowa
reopened in mid-May, and since then the picture has gotten
much, much worse. There were plenty of things, brought to
light by local media and the public health community, that
did not inspire great confidence in the state’s response—
like, for instance, the fact that the state’s main testing infra-
structure was provided by an inexperienced Utah startup
that won a no-bid contract seemingly due to its connections
to Ashton Kutcher, Iowa’s favorite celebrity son.
Most of all, Reynolds was absolutely insistent, press
conference after press conference, that the best approach
to the pandemic was to put it in Iowans’ responsible hands.
The state didn’t need to order its citizens about what to do
because she trusted them to do the right thing. She wouldn’t
issue a mask mandate, nor would she give mayors in her
state the power to do so.
At the time, my father was still holding out hope that
there would be Iowa football games to attend in the fall,
and the prospect of him in a stadium with the mask-lesscitizens from foreign countries, as if one could outrun the
virus and that U.S. borders would protect them.
The coronavirus did of course reach Iowa. The first
known cases were in early March—an adventurous group
of senior travelers had contracted it in Egypt while on
a Nile cruise—though it was probably spreading in the
Hawkeye State already.
In the beginning, Iowa reacted to the coronavirus like
much of the country, with the abrupt closure of schools,
theaters, churches, bars, indoor dining, barbers, and
tanning salons. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a conservative
Republican in her fourth year on the job, issued a state
public health emergency because of the virus on March 17.
But she did not issue a shelter-in-place order, one of the
few governors to not do so, leaving Iowa more open for
business than most states.
I sent my parents N95 masks as well as a pulse oximeter,
which I asked them to use regularly with the strong, and
surely annoying, suggestion that they report their readings
back to me. (They didn’t.) We did weekly Zooms, which
lifted spirits and provided some peace of mind.
Iowa, with a population of 3.2 million, is not a par-
ticularly dense state—it ranks 35th in the U.S. in density.
But in the early weeks of the pandemic, the state had an
alarming number of cases, most of them linked to meat-
packing plants and nursing homes. The virus was hitting
the essential and the infirm. “The tradeoff in Iowa was we
were more than willing to maintain our economy, at the
expense of the health and well-being of our workforce,”
says Swenson, the Iowa State economist.
That Faustian deal led to community spread and
punished other businesses too. Ben Olson, the farmer in
Benton County, had 200 beef cattle lined up, ready for
delivery at a nearby Tyson plant on March 31. Together
they represented hundreds of thousands of dollars and the
seven-month investment in raising them from 800 pounds
to their precisely desired sale weight—1,500 pounds. He
got a call 12 hours before go time: There was an outbreak
at the plant; he’d have to wait. The same thing happened
two weeks later. He sold his oversize cattle a month late,
for a bad price. Pig farmers across the state faced similar
dilemmas; some, with no market for their hogs, had to
“These people, they must have FLUNKED SCIENCE,”
says the mayor of Marshalltown about his citizens who
won’t wear face masks. “They just DON’T GET IT.”