(Radio Iowa) – Items sitting on a work table in the vault at the State Historical Museum may help future generations learn about the pandemic.

The State Historical Museum collects all stories of Iowa history, knowing from our experience that this is a historic time that we’ve been in over the last two years and thinking back to other times that Iowa has been challenged with a health crisis,” museum curator Leo Landis says.

According to Landis, museum staff who put together a World War II in 2016 realized at the start of the pandemic they needed to start a collection. That’s because more than 700 soldiers at Camp Dodge died of the Spanish Flu in 2018, but there’s little in vault to visually illustrate what happened.

“Just thought to ourselves: ‘Wouldn’t it have been great to have a mask from 1918, from the flu pandemic?’ We don’t have that, so as we were moving through the Covid pandemic, we knew we needed to collect.”

The Humboldt County Hospital has donated materials, including personal protective equipment, and the University of Iowa has provided a vial of each of the three vaccines. Landis says that was a priority, because the museum vault does not have a vial of the groundbreaking polio vaccine.

“The promise of a vaccine was so big and, in fact, Sioux City is one of the first communities to get one of the first trials of vaccines as they had an outbreak in the 1950s,” Landis says, “so there’s an Iowa story connected to the national polio vaccine efforts.”

The Covid vaccine vials sitting in the museum’s vault may, in the future, help illustrate the story of the University of Iowa’s participation in the large scale, international clinical trial of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine.

(Radio Iowa) – Surveys on college campuses around the country — and in Iowa – indicate anxiety and depression rates among students continue to rise. The University of Iowa is in the process of hiring three coordinators to guide students to the level of counseling or assistance they may need. Sara Hansen is vice president for student life at the University of Iowa.
“One of the things our students would tell us, I think, across all three campuses is how happy they are to be back on campus,” Hansen says, “but that doesn’t erase kind of the challenges and the fatigue that have built up over the last year, year and a half.”

Nearly nine out of 10 University of Iowa undergrads who answered a recent survey said they had experienced more stress due to the pandemic. Michael Newton, head of Iowa State University’s public safety department, says staff as well as students are struggling and his officers have undergone training in how to respond to someone experiencing a mental health crisis. “The mental health issues and problems that we’re seeing really were exacerbated by the pandemic,” Newton says.

Toyia Younger is senior vice president for student affairs at Iowa State University. She says a relatively new self-help program for I-S-U students meets them where they are — online. “Ironically, we started this before the pandemic and little did we know that almost a year later we would find ourselves in need of significant online therapy opportunities for our students, so we are really pleased with that,” Younger says, “and that’s one of the things that we’ll continuing providing services with.”

Helen Haire is director of the University of Northern Iowa’s department of public safety. She says students are sometimes using drugs and alcohol to self-medicate and deal with their stress or mental health issues. During calendar year 2020, there was a little bit of a decrease in alcohol-related arrests on the Cedar Falls campus, but a slight uptick in drug referrals.
“Some of our neighboring states have legalized marijuana and, because of that, a lot of our students may be a little bit more complacent or a little bit more willing to use the marijuana in our (residence) halls, particularly,” she says. “That’s where most of our referrals come from.”

Another U-N-I administrator says fellow students and faculty are often the first to notice a student is in distress — and many of the students who arrive at the campus counseling center for the first time are accompanied by a professor or by another student.

(Creston, Iowa) – The driver of a 2005 Nissan Maxima complained of leg pain following a rollover accident south of Creston, Tuesday night. According to the Union County Sheriff’s Office, Deputies received a call at around 8:40-p.m. about a vehicle on its side in the ditch, in the area of 205th & Cherry Streets in rural Union County.

Deputies arrived on the scene to find no one around. They eventually made contact with the driver, 45-year-old Selena Joann Lee, of Afton, at her residence. Lee told authorities she was traveling north on Cherry Street when her vehicle went out of control and hit the west side ditch before it flipped around facing south and landed on its passenger side.

Lee was transported from her home to the hospital by ambulance She was cited for Failure to provide proof of insurance, Leaving the scene of an accident, and Failure to Maintain Control. Her vehicle sustained $4,000 damage. The report mentioned she was driving too fast for conditions when she lost control.