On Sunday, Feb. 16 at 6 p.m., KETV will air its hour-long documentary, “COVID-19: Life After the Pandemic,” which highlights everything from the medical communities’ memories of the pandemic, to how businesses reacted and changed, to the long-lasting impact it’s had on schools and the community. Before we can dive into life after the pandemic, we have to remember how we got here. For the medical experts and doctors at Nebraska Medicine and the University of Nebraska Medical Center who responded in the early days of 2020, everything is still vivid. “A new coronavirus that was transmissible from person to person and caused severe respiratory infections was always high on people’s radar as the potential source of the next pandemic,” said Dr. James Lawler, the deputy director of Nebraska Medicine’s Biocontainment Unit and a UNMC professor of infectious diseases.In February 2020, Lawler flew across the Pacific Ocean to board the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship off the coast of Japan. “If the Diamond Princess had been a country at the time, it would have been the country with the second largest number of COVID cases documented in the world after China,” he said. His team’s job was to learn as much as they could about the virus, assess Americans on board the ship, and try to bring them home. What started in Wuhan, China, would soon be in Nebraska. Two of the 15 Americans evacuated from the ship and brought to the Biocontainment Unit, including Bob Thorburn and his wife.”It was a very, very confusing time,” Thorburn said. “I have to hand it to Diamond Princess — they tried to do the best they could with what they had. But like everybody on that ship, including the captain, nobody knew what to do.”Passengers soon turned into patients. They were greeted at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield by men and women in Hazmat-style suits. We would soon a learn new acronym: PPE or personal protective equipment.Nebraska Medicine’s Dr. Michael Wadman was one of the physicians on the tarmac. “Thirteen of the 15 displayed signs and symptoms,” he said. “So we transitioned to isolation care from quarantine and kept them in the Quarantine Unit to provide isolation care and ongoing testing. This is before we knew much about COVID.”None of the patients brought to Omaha from the cruise ship died, but February 2020 was only the beginning. “I was watching a national briefing, and I was next to Dr. James Lawler, and it was the first case of documented community spread in the US on the West Coast,” said Dr. Daniel Johnson, an anesthesiologist. “I heard him say under his breath, ‘Well, here we go.'”Nebraska’s first patient would be a 37-year-old Omaha woman who had a headache. Emma Hutchinson walked into the emergency department at Nebraska Methodist Women’s Hospital. Dr. Pat McMahon quickly discovered her respiratory symptoms and recent travel to England, but getting a COVID-19 test wasn’t easy in March 2020.”You had to call the state, and my sales pitch was -s he’s got a headache, but she’s low SATs or tests,” he said. The X-ray looks like COVID and she just traveled from England, which is a hotspot. So, there was a delay, and in the meantime, infectious disease got involved.”Her nurse with Methodist Health remembers the uncertainty. “I was just saying, ‘It’s OK, I got you,” said Callie Heaton. “I don’t know what’s going to happen and I told her that, but in this moment, I told her, ‘I got you. I will figure it out. We will help you figure it out.'”Within days, Hutchinson was in a coma and transferred to Nebraska Medicine. She spent weeks in the hospital, but survived. Johnson noted the initial surge of patients in Omaha came from two backgrounds: nursing home residents and meat processing workers. “We’re there to help people who are sick, and this was no different,” said Christina Johnson, a nurse manager at Nebraska Medicine.She remembers days when they lost patients in the double digits in her 24-bed COVID Unit. “It was hard,” she said. “At that time, every time, there was someone just as sick ready to take it.”Dr. Katie Willet works in the emergency department at Nebraska Medicine. “One of the first cases was someone who walked in with an oxygen level in the 20s,” she said. “We like to see people in the 90s, get worried in the 50s. Normally, we don’t see people alive in that number, but this was someone three months older than me and previously healthy.”Doctors, nurses and other hospital staff quickly turned into community heroes. “It really hit home of how potentially risky this could be in this job of,” Willet said. “Every day, I’m risking this disease that there’s no treatment for. My experience at that point was that these people are horribly ill, and the thing you’re thinking i,s ‘I hope they still have an ICU bed for me when I get sick.'”Dr. Daniel Johnson said the worst part of the pandemic was in the fall of 2020 when their intensive care unit was completely full. “We had admitted so many patients with respiratory failure from COVID-19 and had converted so many units that we were congested to the point where we couldn’t carry out our normal mission,” he said. “I think a lot of people rose to the challenge,” said Christina Johnson. “And did what they could to take care of people who needed it.”At the end of 2020 came a medical breakthrough: COVID-19 vaccines, created by Operation Warp Speed.”There’s never been a question in my mind that the vaccines are safe, effective, and they saved millions of American lives and tens of millions of lives worldwide,” Lawler said. “One of the most amazing scientific contributions the US has made to the world and something we should be incredibly proud of.”The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t declared over until May 2023, more than three years after the initial wave of cases. Despite the lives saved, Lawler admits that the national health care community has lost a lot of trust. He points to the role of social media. “Information that was erroneous, and in some ways deliberately misleading because of some people’s agendas, came to dominate perceptions,” he said. He also said the health care community needed to be more honest about what it did know, what it didn’t know, and why. Douglas County Health still maintains its COVID-19 dashboard. It shows nearly 1,500 people have died in the five years since the pandemic started. Its data, which only includes confirmed cases, shows a striking difference in death rates based on age — from 1-in-18,000 for people under 19 to 1-in-18 for people 85-plus.”If anybody had said over 1 million people will die from the disease, I think everyone would’ve agreed that’s a horrible prospect,” Dr. Johnson said. “That occurred. The virus spread horribly. It took the lives of over 1 million people and caused long-term disability in millions more.”According to the CDC, by 2022, at least 80% of American adults had received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, but data for January 2025 shows only 20% are up to date on their vaccine. Dr. Mark Rupp, Nebraska Medicine’s director of infection control and epidemiology, said the vaccine was amazingly effective and safe, but not perfect.”It clearly put a dent in the transmission and impact of the virus, but over time, as the virus has mutated, shifted, and new variants have emerged,” Rupp said. “We realized it wasn’t as long-lasting as we’d like.”Now, he points to the politicization and polarization of the virus as reasons to be concerned for the future. “One of the bad things is that memory is short, and we don’t recognize the lessons that should’ve been learned, and we’re setting ourselves up for failure as we go forward,” Rupp said.Lawler worries about the future and said it’s not a matter of if, but when the next pandemic hits.”I think our response would be much worse now than it was in 2020,” he said. “We may be able to produce a vaccine faster, but a vaccine doesn’t do any good if nobody takes it. I think the level of trust we have in the general population — you wouldn’t have a lot of uptake.” Remember to tune in Sunday, Feb. 16 at 6 p.m. to KETV for our one-hour documentary, “COVID-19: Life After the Pandemic.”
On Sunday, Feb. 16 at 6 p.m., KETV will air its hour-long documentary, “COVID-19: Life After the Pandemic,” which highlights everything from the medical communities’ memories of the pandemic, to how businesses reacted and changed, to the long-lasting impact it’s had on schools and the community.
Before we can dive into life after the pandemic, we have to remember how we got here.
For the medical experts and doctors at Nebraska Medicine and the University of Nebraska Medical Center who responded in the early days of 2020, everything is still vivid.
“A new coronavirus that was transmissible from person to person and caused severe respiratory infections was always high on people’s radar as the potential source of the next pandemic,” said Dr. James Lawler, the deputy director of Nebraska Medicine’s Biocontainment Unit and a UNMC professor of infectious diseases.
In February 2020, Lawler flew across the Pacific Ocean to board the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship off the coast of Japan.
“If the Diamond Princess had been a country at the time, it would have been the country with the second largest number of COVID cases documented in the world after China,” he said.
His team’s job was to learn as much as they could about the virus, assess Americans on board the ship, and try to bring them home.
What started in Wuhan, China, would soon be in Nebraska.
Two of the 15 Americans evacuated from the ship and brought to the Biocontainment Unit, including Bob Thorburn and his wife.
“It was a very, very confusing time,” Thorburn said. “I have to hand it to Diamond Princess — they tried to do the best they could with what they had. But like everybody on that ship, including the captain, nobody knew what to do.”
Passengers soon turned into patients. They were greeted at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield by men and women in Hazmat-style suits. We would soon a learn new acronym: PPE or personal protective equipment.
Nebraska Medicine’s Dr. Michael Wadman was one of the physicians on the tarmac.
“Thirteen of the 15 displayed signs and symptoms,” he said. “So we transitioned to isolation care from quarantine and kept them in the Quarantine Unit to provide isolation care and ongoing testing. This is before we knew much about COVID.”
None of the patients brought to Omaha from the cruise ship died, but February 2020 was only the beginning.
“I was watching a national briefing, and I was next to Dr. James Lawler, and it was the first case of documented community spread in the US on the West Coast,” said Dr. Daniel Johnson, an anesthesiologist. “I heard him say under his breath, ‘Well, here we go.'”
Nebraska’s first patient would be a 37-year-old Omaha woman who had a headache. Emma Hutchinson walked into the emergency department at Nebraska Methodist Women’s Hospital.
Dr. Pat McMahon quickly discovered her respiratory symptoms and recent travel to England, but getting a COVID-19 test wasn’t easy in March 2020.
“You had to call the state, and my sales pitch was -s he’s got a headache, but she’s low SATs or tests,” he said. The X-ray looks like COVID and she just traveled from England, which is a hotspot. So, there was a delay, and in the meantime, infectious disease got involved.”
Her nurse with Methodist Health remembers the uncertainty.
“I was just saying, ‘It’s OK, I got you,” said Callie Heaton. “I don’t know what’s going to happen and I told her that, but in this moment, I told her, ‘I got you. I will figure it out. We will help you figure it out.'”
Within days, Hutchinson was in a coma and transferred to Nebraska Medicine. She spent weeks in the hospital, but survived.
Johnson noted the initial surge of patients in Omaha came from two backgrounds: nursing home residents and meat processing workers.
“We’re there to help people who are sick, and this was no different,” said Christina Johnson, a nurse manager at Nebraska Medicine.
She remembers days when they lost patients in the double digits in her 24-bed COVID Unit.
“It was hard,” she said. “At that time, every time, there was someone just as sick ready to take it.”
Dr. Katie Willet works in the emergency department at Nebraska Medicine.
“One of the first cases was someone who walked in with an oxygen level in the 20s,” she said. “We like to see people in the 90s, get worried in the 50s. Normally, we don’t see people alive in that number, but this was someone three months older than me and previously healthy.”
Doctors, nurses and other hospital staff quickly turned into community heroes.
“It really hit home of how potentially risky this could be in this job of,” Willet said. “Every day, I’m risking this disease that there’s no treatment for. My experience at that point was that these people are horribly ill, and the thing you’re thinking i,s ‘I hope they still have an ICU bed for me when I get sick.'”
Dr. Daniel Johnson said the worst part of the pandemic was in the fall of 2020 when their intensive care unit was completely full.
“We had admitted so many patients with respiratory failure from COVID-19 and had converted so many units that we were congested to the point where we couldn’t carry out our normal mission,” he said.
“I think a lot of people rose to the challenge,” said Christina Johnson. “And did what they could to take care of people who needed it.”
At the end of 2020 came a medical breakthrough: COVID-19 vaccines, created by Operation Warp Speed.
“There’s never been a question in my mind that the vaccines are safe, effective, and they saved millions of American lives and tens of millions of lives worldwide,” Lawler said. “One of the most amazing scientific contributions the US has made to the world and something we should be incredibly proud of.”
The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t declared over until May 2023, more than three years after the initial wave of cases. Despite the lives saved, Lawler admits that the national health care community has lost a lot of trust.
He points to the role of social media.
“Information that was erroneous, and in some ways deliberately misleading because of some people’s agendas, came to dominate perceptions,” he said.
He also said the health care community needed to be more honest about what it did know, what it didn’t know, and why.
Douglas County Health still maintains its COVID-19 dashboard. It shows nearly 1,500 people have died in the five years since the pandemic started.
Its data, which only includes confirmed cases, shows a striking difference in death rates based on age — from 1-in-18,000 for people under 19 to 1-in-18 for people 85-plus.
“If anybody had said over 1 million people will die from the disease, I think everyone would’ve agreed that’s a horrible prospect,” Dr. Johnson said. “That occurred. The virus spread horribly. It took the lives of over 1 million people and caused long-term disability in millions more.”
According to the CDC, by 2022, at least 80% of American adults had received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, but data for January 2025 shows only 20% are up to date on their vaccine.
Dr. Mark Rupp, Nebraska Medicine’s director of infection control and epidemiology, said the vaccine was amazingly effective and safe, but not perfect.
“It clearly put a dent in the transmission and impact of the virus, but over time, as the virus has mutated, shifted, and new variants have emerged,” Rupp said. “We realized it wasn’t as long-lasting as we’d like.”
Now, he points to the politicization and polarization of the virus as reasons to be concerned for the future.
“One of the bad things is that memory is short, and we don’t recognize the lessons that should’ve been learned, and we’re setting ourselves up for failure as we go forward,” Rupp said.
Lawler worries about the future and said it’s not a matter of if, but when the next pandemic hits.
“I think our response would be much worse now than it was in 2020,” he said. “We may be able to produce a vaccine faster, but a vaccine doesn’t do any good if nobody takes it. I think the level of trust we have in the general population — you wouldn’t have a lot of uptake.”
Remember to tune in Sunday, Feb. 16 at 6 p.m. to KETV for our one-hour documentary, “COVID-19: Life After the Pandemic.”
