Cedar Rapids Gazette: Iowa couples delivered the fewest babies last year since the state began keeping track in 1915 — a disturbing decline brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic that also pushed deaths to a yearly high. According to preliminary numbers issued by the state Department of Public Health, live births in 2020 totaled 36,054, marking only the third time in more than a century that the number of babies born in a single year fell below 37,000 — 36,790 in 1995 and 36,641 in 1997. Iowa’s high year for births was 66,123 in 1951.