LINCOLN, Neb. (KMTV) — Governor Ricketts again said Monday that his actions, just as the coronavirus was hitting Nebraska, slowed the spread and put Nebraska in a different position than the rest of the country.
“We are different from other states that maybe didn’t have as much advanced warning, that maybe didn’t take the steps we took, so we’ve seen a slower spread here than maybe other places,” says Ricketts.
Lawmakers, including four state senators, signed a letter last week, urging the governor to get more strict and order people to stay at home.
Just a day before that, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s on President’s Trump’s coronavirus task force, told CNN he wasn’t sure why all state’s didn’t have stay at home orders.
Ricketts says he and Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa cleared things up with Fauci today.
“We were concerned that his message was somehow getting confused with what we were doing. We described what we are doing and he said, ‘Hey, you can let people know we’re all on the same page in regard to what we are doing in our states and what his message is about,” says Ricketts.
Just a few hours later, Dr. Fauci said at the White House briefing that he had good conversations with the governors and that their orders are "functionally the same" as stay-at-home orders.
Ricketts showed data last week that said Nebraskans were staying home eight percent more.
He would like to see that go up and left open the possibility of new restrictions.
“When we get new data, we will reevaluate that, so we could do more restrictions in the future, based upon different different data that we have right now. Trust me, we’re watching this data daily if not hourly,” says Ricketts.
Ricketts also said the Nebraska National Guard is preparing to help with testing in central Nebraska.
