Infectious Disease Expert Concerned About Potential of New Wave of Coronavirus Cases in Nebraska
By Jack Williams, Managing Editor and Reporter Nebraska Public Media News
July 2, 2020, 3:35 p.m. ·

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An infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha says he’s concerned Nebraska could see a new wave of coronavirus cases in the next few weeks. NET’s Jack Williams spoke with Dr. Mark Rupp about Nebraska’s recent re-openings and why there’s concern we could still see our cases increase again.
NET News: It's been a few weeks since Nebraska entered the third phase of reopening. Overall, how do you think the state has handled the increased capacity in restaurants and bars and other public venues?
Dr. Mark Rupp: Well, I think we're trying to balance the need to reopen our society in our and our economy while at the same time trying to preserve public health. And I think that we need to be really careful. Otherwise we're going to experience the same type of increase in cases that we're seeing in the southern and western part of the United States. So I have concerns that here in another week or two, we're going to see potentially the effects of people not adhering to the physical distancing and masking recommendations, while at the same time out enjoying themselves at their favorite watering hole and eating establishment.
NET News: You're alluding to rollbacks in California, Arizona and Texas. And it sounds like you're concerned that we may have a similar situation in Nebraska. Why haven't we seen that yet? Is there some sort of delayed effect for this part of the country maybe?
Dr. Mark Rupp: Well, anytime you're looking at this epidemic curve, what you have to understand is that what you see today is really reflective of what went on a couple of weeks ago. And so nothing moves particularly quickly as far as making an intervention and then seeing the immediate effect of that. That's a rather slow process where you start to see the build up, and then it takes off exponentially after that. But it takes sometimes two, three, four weeks before you really see the impact of some sort of a measure either to liberalize precautions, or if you have to backtrack and start to clamp down again.
NET News: You just talked about the need to be cautious when it comes to re-openings. But you've also said in the past that we don't necessarily have to go down to no new cases in the community in order to return to some sort of normalcy. Do you think that's still the case? Are we going to have to learn how to live with coronavirus in the short term?
Dr. Mark Rupp: I think that unfortunately is absolutely true. There's nothing miraculous that's going to come along that I'm aware of that's going to eradicate this virus or prevent it from spreading for the foreseeable months. And so I think that we will need to learn how to cope with this. If we get down to a point where we have a low number of cases where we're able to do the testing to do the contact tracing to do the hard quarantining, those are the sort of, you know, they're fairly mundane, but they're so critically important. Those are the things that we'll need to be able to put into into effect in order to maintain a safer society and allow our businesses to open and allow us to have some degree of social interactions again.
NET News: As cases go down in a community, does the virus lose its footing and actually weaken? Or is it still lurking out there, just waiting for transmission opportunities?
Dr. Mark Rupp: Yeah, I think it's more of the latter, where it's just lying in wait for us to let down our guard. It's kind of a shame that this has been so politicized when it's such an obvious public health issue. The virus doesn't care if we're in a red state or a blue state, it doesn't care if we're a Jew or Gentile or we're Orthodox. It's very ecumenical, and it will take advantage of wherever people gather. It just doesn't care if we're sinners or saints. It's gonna take advantage of us if we come together in a congregate setting, a group setting where we're sharing the same airspace and not taking precautions.
NET News: Along those same lines, obviously, the debate over face coverings and public has become a fracture point these days. Where do you stand on this and do you understand why some people don't know what to believe?
Dr. Mark Rupp: You I think that there's a number of things that are in effect here. Number one, is that we don't have crystal clear data. So I'll acknowledge that that there haven't been rigorously done, well-controlled sorts of trials to answer some of these questions. And the reason for that is that this is a new infection. We've known about it here for the last six months or so. Clearly there's not been enough time to craft these really rigorous studies that people want to see. Therefore, we have to extrapolate from data that we know about. And that's what's being done. And there has been some change in recommendations over time, as we've learned more, and I think some people misinterpret that as oh, nobody knows what's going on. You know, I can do what I want, that sort of thing. I think the masks are important. And even though there isn't perfect data, if we wait until we have perfect data, it'll be too late. And so I think the masks do play a protective role in a number of ways. So these masks are important for a whole bunch of different reasons that can have an impact. And we should all be doing this as part of the social contract. I wear a mask to protect you, you wear a mask to protect me. But it also, as I've already mentioned, protects the person who's wearing it as well.