North Iowa Reporter

North Iowa officials were preparing the region for the coronavirus at a press conference March 24. 

Mayor Bill Schickel, CG Public Health Director Brian Hanft and Senior Vice President for MercyOne, Theresa Mock, said it is important to social distance, avoid going in public and to stay at home at the conference, the Globe Gazette reported. 

MercyOne is one of the largest health care providers in North Iowa, but hasn't yet said how it is preparing for "the surge" of COVID-19. 

Angie Creger, MercyOne North Iowa spokeswoman, said to the Globe Gazette that she couldn't give access to the COVID-19 testing facility. 

If an individual thinks they have COVID-19, they should not go to urge care or an ER. Instead they should call MercyOne's family health and be screened for the virus. 

At the press conference, Mock said MercyOne had done about 20 COVID-19 tests. 

"Every day, the number of tests needed is going up, and as they start coming back positive in the future we're working on what we need to do in terms of critical care – beds, ventilators, staff to be able to care for them," Mock said at the conference. "That's our biggest worry and that's what we're looking at a week at a time. The next two to four weeks the big thing we're preparing for is if there is a big surge in patients."

Individuals 65 or older make up 31% of all COVID-19 cases, 45% of all coronavirus hospitalizations and 80% of deaths, the Globe Gazette reported. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said they expect 20% of the nation's population to become infected with the virus. The CDC also said the virus can be fatal to all age groups. 

But Propublica, an investigative reporting news nonprofit, analyzed similar data and came up with three scenarios where different percentages of the population became infected (20%, 40% and 60%). 

While the scenarios can be alarming, they are a great way of demonstrating why "flattening the curve" is so important. Flattening the curve means reducing the amount of people that need care for COVID-19 at one time, which was emphasized at the press conference, the Globe Gazette reported. 

The more individuals continue to interact and not practice social distancing, the less of a chance the curve has of flattening. 

“The way to permanently stop new cases from setting off long chains of transmission is to have each case infect considerably less than one case on average,” Dr. Marc Lipsitch, head of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, said to Propublica. “The numbers will go down. There will still be little outbreaks, but not big ones.”