OMAHA, Neb. (AP) – Gov. Pete Ricketts is resurrecting a website version of Nebraska’s Daily Virus Reporting Dashboard, as the number of COVID-19-related hospitalizations continued to rise over the summer.
The state removed its daily virus dashboard in June at the same time that the last of Ricketts’ pandemic-related emergency orders were allowed to expire and cases were low. At the end of June, the state was reporting 253 cases of the virus per week and 28 people were hospitalized statewide.
The state’s decision to stop providing daily updates on COVID-19 has been widely criticized by health experts who use the data to track the spread of the virus. A group of 11 state senators wrote a letter to Ricketts last month urging him to restore the daily virus dashboard.
The state launched a weekly website to report certain numbers of viruses in July, but it did not offer as many details and information as the old daily site. In the latest state update last Wednesday, 415 people were hospitalized with the virus.
Even though the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 remains well below last fall’s peak of 987, hospital capacity has been a concern in recent weeks as hospitals are very busy with non-COVID cases.
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Over the past week, the number of people hospitalized with the virus represented more than 10% of available hospital beds in the state, Ricketts said. About 28% of the state’s adult hospital beds and 23% of adult intensive care beds remained available statewide on Monday. Ricketts said COVID-19 patients made up about 15% of hospitalizations in the state on Monday.
The seven-day moving average of daily new cases in Nebraska has improved slightly over the past two weeks, from 688.86 new cases per day on September 4 to 672.43 new cases per day on Saturday.
State officials said part of the reason the Daily Dashboard was taken down was because state and federal privacy laws, which were suspended during the viral emergency, limited the amount of information state health officials could disclose. Ricketts signed a new executive order on Monday again suspending those privacy rules to allow for the new dashboard.
The state planned to launch its new virus dashboard website on Monday afternoon. Ricketts said the state would abandon its new dashboard site if virus hospitalizations again fell below 10% of all hospitalizations.
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