Tim Timmons has been with the Lincoln/Lancaster County Health Department since 1974 and since 1998 he has been working with the Communicable Disease Program.
Tim talked to us about the challenges that his Department had with the COVID-19 pandemic which is not over yet. Tim said that in the 1980’s we had AIDS, in 2001 we had Hand tracks, and in 2009 Eboli pandemic, but nothing challenged them more than the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
In March of 2020 everyone was watching China and taking notes. The first case in the US was in the state of Washington in a long-term facility. Nebraska’s first case came from a processing plant where workers work closely together. Many outbreaks from the processing plants came from those workers who exposed their families. One of the problems was that we had shortages of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
In April 2020 we saw some spikes in hospitalizations and cases continued to spike. In the second wave of infection’s, it was different because it was hitting 20-, 30-, and 40-year-olds and the identifying connection was from bars. The people were not taking any precautions, and this was causing more of a community spread. Then we started to plateau downward for while until the third wave hit.
Another challenge was testing/screening people for the virus. In the beginning all tests had to be sent to a national lab because the local public health labs did not have the capacity to do a lot of screening. If it was sent to the national lab it took 7-10 days to get the results back and the people had to stay home and isolate. Along came the drive-thru testing labs which were set up by St. Elizabeth (through Test Nebraska) which was a state testing and Bryan Health which also set up drive-thru testing labs. All a person did was go online and sign up for a time and drive-thru, get the sample and in a few day’s they had the results. Today we now and go to a pharmacy to have it done or purchase a home kit to have it done.
In early March and April our schools and universities show down, along with many businesses. We could only do banking through the drive-thru, we wanted food went through the drive-thru and took it home to eat or we learned to cook for ourselves at home. Many offices were having their people working from home and some still do. Churches shut down their Sunday services and started to present those services as livestream. The Health Department worked with the schools and universities to make sure the kids could get back to a normal school day and so far this year their has not been any major cases.
When the third wave hit it hitting those in the long-term facilities and older citizens. Tim said you wondered how do we protect these people. Many people who worked in the long-term facilities would leave for home and then return to work among those most susceptible to the virus not realizing what was happening. During this third wave many hospitalizations took place and some of those in the Lincoln hospitals were from surrounding areas, besides locally in Lancaster County. Many hospitals had to send their patients to Lincoln because the smaller hospitals could not handle the case loads and the larger hospitals in Nebraska had to find places to send some of their patients. During this time, it was not unusual to have 400 cases per day. This also put many patients, who had other diseases in trouble because they needed to be hospitalized too. Even some surgeries were curtailed during this third wave of the virus.
One thing we learned around the country was that we needed to use masks when we were outside and around crowds. We needed to stay 6 ft away from others (distancing ourselves), do a lot of hand washing and sanitizing. Today, we have some places that do screenings before you can beyond the doors, such as temperature taking and asking questions. This has help us get to what we know today and since many have been vaccinated, we have removed a few of these barriers.
In mid-December along came the first vaccine from Pfizer which was a real plus to many. Tim shared that the death toll was high in 2020: October (21); November (34); December (74); January (45); February (23) and March (6) and April (5). As you can see the vaccine did make a difference. We have come out of the third wave and have plateau for some time.
Today we have about 46% vaccinated and would like to reach about 75% people being vaccinated. The Health Department has held several large-scale vaccination clinics, but are now trying to work with smaller clinics to reach those out in the rural areas to get people vaccinated.
We are not still out of the pandemic, but let’s hope that we soon will be.