Inside Nebraska’s Surprisingly Effective Covid Strategy

Stryder50 · Apr 29, 2022

Inside Nebraska’s Surprisingly Effective Covid Strategy

Nebraska’s obsession with government efficiency gave it an advantage when the virus struck.
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EXCERPTS:
OMAHA, Neb. — The world’s Covid outbreak wasn’t officially a pandemic yet, but on March 2, 2020 in Omaha, something clicked for Pete Ricketts.

The Nebraska governor, then about a year into his second term, was sitting in a conference room getting a PowerPoint briefing from two infectious-disease experts; elsewhere in the University of Nebraska Medical Center complex he’d come to visit, two survivors of a cruise ship-borne Covid outbreak off the coast of Japan were about to be released from federal quarantine. This was just a day after New York had reported its very first Covid case, and Washington state was still the nation’s “hot spot” with 18 cases and six deaths. But as James Lawler and Chris Kratochvil clicked through their slides showing the trends from China, Ricketts understood things could get much worse in his state.
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This conversation about protecting hospitals, back in the era when New Yorkers were still being encouraged to go to restaurants, well before the coasts’ contagion began closing in on the Midwest in earnest, helped define what became, by some measures, one of the most effective and balanced Covid responses in the United States. Ricketts is a mandate-shunning Republican who runs a heavily Republican and rural state with a middling vaccination rate — factors that have been linked to worse pandemic health outcomes in other states. He never ordered a statewide shutdown when 43 other governors, Democrats and Republicans, did so; he has stood against, or even supported lawsuits over, local mask requirements; he has told state agencies not to comply with federal vaccine mandates and gotten scolded by the U.S. secretary of defense for objecting to such requirements for the National Guard. And yet by the fall of last year, when POLITICO crunched the data of state pandemic responses on a combination of health, economic, social and educational factors, one state came out with the best average: Nebraska.
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