Photo: Thesavagenorwegian / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Gov. Kim Reynolds allowed bars to reopen on Sept. 16, 2020, in four of the six Iowa counties she had closed as COVID-19 hot spots: Black Hawk, Dallas, Linn and Polk. Restaurants there could also sell alcohol normally again.
To keep cases from rebounding, the state made it faster to punish individual bars that broke distancing rules. Reynolds said the state wanted to give owners a chance to do it right, and if they didn’t, they would be fined and shut down.
Johnson and Story counties, home to the University of Iowa and Iowa State, stayed closed until at least Sept. 27. Reynolds said young adults were still driving new cases there.
On Sept. 18, she extended the state’s public health disaster emergency another 30 days, as she had been doing each month. She also discussed her dispute with the Des Moines school board, which wanted to keep classes online.
Jill Ostrander writes for Clarion News Online.