92 FORTUNE FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021
become somewhat obsessed with Tama County Public
Health’s Facebook page. The information was clear and
the posts impressively transparent; the office regularly up-
dated case numbers and explained why they were higher
than the state’s (the state’s data was behind). Following the
posts, you could also sense a growing, desperate pleading
behind them: Wear a mask! Wash your hands! Protect
your grandparents!
You only had to read the comments to get a sense of
what the office was up against. While there were plenty
of supportive and thankful followers, comments often
enough devolved into heated arguments between citizens
about why there were so many cases in the county. Others
argued the whole thing was overblown.
Even though her team tries mightily to push out facts
over their own Facebook page, Zoffka largely blames social
media for the misinformation that has spread within the
community about COVID, and for the harsh, bullying tone
in which many discuss the virus, both online and increas-
ingly in person. She expects hurt feelings and memories
of the animosity that has emerged during COVID will
linger, and that the doubters will remain. “I think people
who don’t believe are never going to believe until they’re
affected directly,” she says with some resignation.
When I spoke with Zoffka, her staff was working their
way through administering its supply of Moderna vaccine
doses. The logistics had been a challenge, particularly
through the holidays, but it was going all right. She hasn’t
had a lot of time to process what stage of the pandemic
journey she’s in, or think much about the future. She’s
just been responding—to questions about the virus, or the
vaccine, or cases that need investigating, or all the other
things that land on her desk. She’s hopeful that a lot of
people will get vaccinated, and that maybe life will start
inching its way back to normalcy by the end of the year.
“I’ve kind of had it in my head that 2021 is going to be
similar to 2020 in a lot of ways.”When the state climatologist Justin Glisan
went out on his first trip to survey the derecho-impacted
fields, the scene was staggering—acres and acres of corn
blown flat, snapped off, or tipped so far over that it was
not salvageable. Some of it had been further damaged by
hail, shredded, as if it had taken on machine-gun fire.
“To stand in a field and to be able to look across it and
realize I can see things I should not be able to see be-
cause the corn is just flat, it’s devastating” says Meaghan
Anderson, a field agronomist with Iowa State University
Extension and Outreach. She choked up for a moment,
then added, “I have a job where I get a paycheck every
two weeks. I don’t put hundreds of thousands of dollars
upfront to plant something in April and then hope that,
come September or October, I can harvest it and make myin cases after the derecho; the county had made commu-
nity meals and cooling stations available to residents dur-
ing the weeklong period they—and Tama County Public
Health—went without power, making cases especially
complicated to trace.
But things got really ugly at the start of the school
year, as quarantines that were prescribed after known
COVID-19 exposures started to affect sports. “People were
very angry,” says Zoffka, who says her office’s attempts
to investigate contacts or inform people of exposures to
the virus were often met with verbal abuse. “People think
they have the right to call you names and yell and scream
and threaten.”
Soon she noticed people taking a different but equally
bad-faith approach to her office’s outreach. “People got
smart very fast when the definition of a close contact
changed to being within six feet of someone for consecu-
tive 15 minutes.” People said to the case investigators,
“Well, you don’t have a tape measure or a stopwatch. You
don’t know.” Or: “You can’t prove that we were there.”
While Zoffka’s team has had good support from part-
ners like the school system, local business, law enforce-
ment, and the Meskwaki Settlement, such attitude from
community members was a disillusioning blow: “I don’t
think we expected that early on. Our thought was, ‘We
want to keep people safe. People want to keep other
people safe.’ But then once [public health efforts] really
affected their personal lives after some of the restrictions
have been lifted, it got kind of rough.”
Given that, Zoffka says it was hard to stomach the
governor’s continuing reliance on Iowans to “do the right
thing” to control the virus. Beyond slowing the spread of
disease, Zoffka says, a mask mandate would have sup-
ported businesses in the community who were trying to
encourage safe behavior and often getting pushback.
In studying how the pandemic was playing out in
Iowa—before I spoke with Zoffka—I had come across and
WHAT COMES NEXT : THE HEARTLAND$11
BILLIONEstimated total damage caused by the derecho
after its 14-hour, 770-mile run across Iowa and
through much of the Midwest, making it the most
costly thunderstorm in American history