OMAHA, Neb. — University of Nebraska Medical Center Chancellor Jeffrey Gold warns the next seven to ten days will be very telling if Nebraska has another COVID-19 spike.
He says the race is on between how fast new COVID variants spread across the state and how fast the community can get vaccinated.
As of Tuesday, Nebraska now has almost 40 cases of the highly infectious U.K. COVID variant and two cases of the Brazil variant. Gold says the steady increase of these variants in the state mixed with Easter weekend plans could have deadly consequences.
"And so it is a race," he said. "The rate of vaccination in the state of Nebraska is one of the top in the country and if we can maintain this pace we will get to herd immunity and we'll probably get there before many other parts of the United States."
According to the Centers for Disease Control, Nebraska is in the top twenty states fully vaccinating residents per 100,000 residents.The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services incident commander Angie Ling says the state is going to continue to quickly push out the vaccine.
"I think here in the next seven to ten days we're going to be seeing that general population is able to get vaccinated," she said.
Seven to ten days is when Gold says we'll also see just how much the variants spread, putting additional possible restrictions back on the table.
“The next seven to ten days will tell the tale to whether we need to do that," he said.