Latest / Caught on the Mike... / "In The Public Interest"- with Dr. Bob Rauner MD, MPH

Transcript

"In The Public Interest"- with Dr. Bob Rauner MD, MPH · Caught on the Mike...

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Warning due to some language and subject matter, listener discretion is advised.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I remember driving home on vacation to Colorado on the weekend of March 13, 2020, all too well.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: That was the weekend it felt like the world ducked down.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: We were all face to face with the first pandemic of our lifetime.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: And roughly 16 months later, we're still dealing with it.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Vaccinated, unvaccinated, masked on, or masked off.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Joining me on the podcast today is Dr.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Bob Browner.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's a master of public health that's been making weekly coronavirus update videos garnering the attention of Nebraskans and folks nationwide.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: He's a source of information I've grown to trust, and I feel very lucky to have him on the podcast today.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Caught on the Mic.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Bob Browner, first of all, I want to thank you for being on the show today.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Secondly, I want to thank you for your community update videos.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: When the levy broke the second week of March 2020, and uh your videos started circulating online.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: My peers and I, my colleagues and I, we were watching your videos weekly.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I really appreciated having that resource.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you're welcome.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what it is that you do?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I started out life as a small-town family doc in Sydney, Nebraska, which is my hometown where I grew up.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, my wife also is a physician, and then we moved back to Lincoln where she's from uh in 2003 to teach at a Reddency program.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we taught other people how to be small-town family docks, essentially.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then I decided uh, well, some things happened, uh, just things I was seeing in the community with diabetes and fitness and problems we were having.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: I started getting more of an interest in public health and decided to go back and get my master's in public health, and then uh had a couple projects come up at the same time.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I rather than doing one halftime and being on the faculty of halftime, I took both the projects and I've kind of run with it ever since.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so my day job, I spend 70% of my time.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm chief medical officer of a system of clinics, and I help them improve quality of care.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: They provide everything from reducing hospitalizations to improving diabetes to cancer screening, stuff like that.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then 30% of my time, I do a lot of nonprofit public health projects in Lincoln and around the state where I do everything from work with schools to safety net clinics, stuff like that.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh last two years I'm also on the school board, and so that all those three jobs kind of came together because of coronavirus because all three were heavily impacted.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of how those podcasts started out where those YouTube videos started, is all three organizations were asking me kind of the same question.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought I'll just recruit record a 10-minute summary of the math, what I can see right now.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I started sending that out every two twice a week for a while.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's about every other week, but you know, that's the same problems keep popping up.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody has the questions, news is all over the map, people have a hard time putting into context, and so that's kind of how they've kept going.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I keep doing them because there's still you know over a thousand people that watch them, so I figure I better keep doing them because they're they seem to be helpful.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: So uh absolutely they were and are.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I was just gonna say this job had to have been challenging over the course of the last 18 months, but I think uh I think you just answered that.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: What was a typical workday like when this thing kind of popped off and just really started picking up steam?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's just been crazy because it affected everything I do, you know.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: The schools, you know, they had to shut them down on short notice with very little information, and it was a really risky decision.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I remember talking to Steve Joel and he said, you know what?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: If we close the schools too early and we were wrong, we're gonna look stupid.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: But if we don't close the schools and we were wrong, we could a lot of people might die.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's a tough situation to be in.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so, but I think you know, they made the right decision.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Clinics had to do the same thing, they had to pivot to not seeing patients, trying to figure out where they're gonna get their protective equipment.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, a lot of primary care clinics got nothing.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't, the hospitals got, you know, emergency supplies, the clinics got nothing.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: They were making their own masks out of cloth when they ran out, you know.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody was scrambling.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then on my nonprofit, I work with small nonprofits, they were in the same situation, you know.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Can we see our clients, the people we work with?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: How's El Central DS America gonna work with this?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: How does this Head Start daycare program?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: How are we gonna adjust?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so everybody was a mad scramble.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it's pretty much everybody's schedule went to hell, and you just did what you did to make it work.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think uh I think one of our problems right now is so many people have scrambled for so long, they're kind of getting burnt out.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's some of the pandemic fee is just plain old fatigue trying to figure out how do we make it all work.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: I had Dr.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Mike Friedman, who is a clinical psychiatrist on a couple of weeks ago, and we talked about the uh potential mental health pandemic that could be looming as a result of all of this.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you're already seeing it to some extent, and yeah, uh occupational burnout is happening, and I I would almost attribute that to uh the job market, like retailers and and restaurants struggling uh to find help.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't necessarily think it's just a wage thing, I think there is some serious burnout going on as a result of all of this.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the first video you posted was on March 8th, 2020, because I I remember very, very, very well that Friday, March 13th, my phone was ringing off the hook.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: School was getting canceled.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: I was I, you know, my day job, I had people leaving the job, actually quitting because of everything happening.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Your video number three, the Monday after has 14,000 views on it.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: What was that like?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was kind of weird.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the first one, I literally was like everybody I was asking the same question.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I put it out there and I sent it to the various groups like Lincoln Public Schools Leadership, the Nebraska Association of School Boards, the clinics I work with, the nonprofits I work with.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: I sent it out there, and a couple of people said, Hey, that was really helpful.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And and before I left home, I figured, well, I'll just put it on Facebook too.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I posted on Facebook, I went home, my wife and I, we had dinner, and I looked at, I was like, huh, I wonder what happened.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it had a couple hundred views.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then uh by the next morning it had like 800 views.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, wow, I guess a lot of people want to know this stuff.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I started getting these comments.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: People said, so I just kept doing them and then they grew.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And they've they've gone.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: I they've they're right now, they're about 1400-ish views.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: I've had one get one up to 28,000.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of depends on what the topics are and what people are most worried about, what's controversial.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they've trended down a little bit because people thought we were in the clear.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, I think they're gonna go back up again because we're not in the clear, unfortunately.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it just kind of happened organically.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and it and it's not just me, actually.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting across like some of the podcasts I listen to, the same thing happened.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like Michael Osterholm up in Minnesota, he just started doing it.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Johns Hopkins just started throwing theirs together.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, my favorite Facebook page for this stuff is your local epidemiologist.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: She's an epidemiologist in Texas.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: She just started putting things on Facebook because everybody, same thing, everybody's asking the same questions.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just put it on a Facebook page.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of people are doing this.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, it's because the government's gotten so dysfunctional at every level.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: So the people who are should be putting out this information are not putting it out.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: So all of us in the field are just putting it out anyway, essentially.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think you hit the nail on the head because I think most of America, whether you want to believe it or not, exists in kind of this purple zone, and we you know, trying to weed through the political minutiae, what we were being fed, we we needed to hear from the professionals.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was such a struggle because my line has always been this is not a political crisis, this is a public health crisis.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Eliminating that political minutiae and the media hype.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: What's the most important thing that we need to know right now in July of 2021, about 18 months later?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, unfortunately, it's still heavily politicized, so that hasn't gotten much better, unfortunately.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, right now I'm I'm most worried about people literally just hiding the data.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: They've the government some government folks have given up or they're intentionally hiding data.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's making hard for us in the middle to make an a good decision.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, like when my bot my dad and I were on a road trip, uh, we're stopping in, you know, Moab or you know uh Grand Junction.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can look on a website and see how risky this community, but now they're starting to shut off access.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's preventing us from making our own informed decision, which really bothers me.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the delta variant's gonna be a problem.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's not gonna be everywhere because some peaks places did a good job of vaccinating, some did not, and it's pretty highly correlating with that.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I what bothers me is we didn't fix the things we need to fix.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't depoliticize it like we needed to still.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's still a problem.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, there's a there's a really good book out called The Premonition uh by Michael Lewis, where he talks about a lot of the insiders, one of them being James Lawler, who's who's who's why I did my first update actually, was seeing one of James Lawler's presentations.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they kind of leave it hanging at the end of the book because what needs to get fixed, and it's not getting fixed yet.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of the pre the pre-9-11 commission report.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's the stuff that went wrong.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now what?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, I hope that means there's gonna be a second book, for example.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's uh I was reading today about a uh Delta Plus variant that's becoming dominant in India, and there's concerns that the efficacy of some of the vaccines might be challenged by this Delta Plus variant.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: So are you familiar and can you kind of shed light on that a little bit?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean the challenge is that this is a virus that keeps mutating and changing.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so there was an assumption by some, unfortunately, that it'd be like measles.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I get it and I'm done.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that is not true with coronavirus.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mutate as fast as influenza, but it still does mutate.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we've learned that it does that, unfortunately.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: So just because you got the original strain March of last year, you're not immune to the next one coming around.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And even the it was probably the B117 alpha that came from UK, the people that was close to what we were having November, December, January, you're already immunity, you're not immune to Delta now.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why UK is having the same problem.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so this immune this until we slow down transmission, which we're not doing, unfortunately, we're gonna get more variants.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So right now, I'm still probably being feeling pretty comfortable.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: I got Moderna, my wife got Pfizer, my kids, my three daughters got Pfizer.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm confident right now we're okay.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about the next one though.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's what worries me more because we know this Delta is gonna come raging through rural America that didn't get vaccinated.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And will that be a Delta Plus plus?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we don't know.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's the big problem.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: We could literally be starting over again.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the good news is they'll they'll they'll create a new booster to the new variant faster because they've proven a lot of stuff and they've got the manufacturing capacity to ramp it up fast, but we're gonna have the same delivery problems though again, and we're still gonna, I don't know, can we get past this conspiracy theory phase of you know of America?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, as Nebraskans, it was really disheartening to read on July 6th that Nebraska had a one-week 80% increase in COVID cases, 152% over the two-week period, according to the Omaha World Herald, with the infection rate trending younger on top of that.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: I know you don't believe it's the college world series that caused that.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Why did that happen?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was that was part of it.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was a it was a lot of things, unfortunately.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's to point to the one thing, it's not the one thing, right?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's everything from the house party to the world college world series to the crowded bar downtown.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: All of these things add up.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the part of the problem is these things are not, they're what I would call probabilistic, not deterministic.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: I can't tell you that if you do two, you're gonna get exactly four.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of chance there.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: It could be that I was just lucky and that the people who showed up to my party just didn't happen to be infected and it was just dumb luck.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: It could be that even though it was a small party, two of them happened to be infected.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now we're all infected.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's that luck of only it only takes a couple people to spark a pandemic if given the right circumstances.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And a baseball state, crowded baseball stadium is one of those stadiums.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: A concert is potentially one of those.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: A school, unfortunately, is potentially one of those.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a matter of luck.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: You could get lucky.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's unfortunate, it's kind of like a game of rush and roulette.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: You could get lucky 22 times potentially, keep spinning, but you might not.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so people have a hard time with that.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: There is a large element of a chance, unfortunately.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why it's so hard to explain to people.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: It almost felt like maybe we were ripping that band-aid off or ripping the mask off a little bit too fast.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: We could we could have relaxed some measures, but every uh the problem in the United States, it's like we slam on the gas, we slam on the brakes, we slam on the bass, we slam on the brakes.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And no wonder the public's getting confused that we need a little more nuance and consistency and quit going to extremes.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, we went we went to let it or rip prematurely.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Our vaccination rate wasn't close to where it needed to be before we started relaxing everything.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so, again, we've missed our opportunity to get under control.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Are we going to do it again next time?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's going to take us months to get Delta under control.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Will we finally learn a lesson?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, what are your feelings on this whole concept of percentage of Americans getting vaccinated and it leading to a herd immunity?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, herd immunity has only happened a couple times in history, and it was combinations of both vaccination and basic public health measures.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, smallpox being the main one, but that was a virus that didn't mutate.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: We've suppressed others to the point where you hardly see them, like typhoid.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: My great-great-grandfather's death brother died from typhoid.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one of Abraham Lincoln's sons died in the White House because of contaminated water.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: When's the last time you heard anybody getting typhoid?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, mostly we just got by clean water and sanitation, you know.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, like some people say we just got to quote live with coronavirus.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, typhoid and cholera and salmon, they're still around.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean we quit drinking, washing our hands, and quit preparing our chicken properly.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we still do those things.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you can't go back to you know drinking out of the stream and not washing your hands again.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: We learned how to not do that.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you can't get away rid of everything.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the things we should have kept.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: We should have done masks and crowded, we shouldn't have dropped masks in crowded environments, for example.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we'll see how school pans out.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a month to get this thing figured out.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then on top of that, we put like like one of our challenges going to come up is that school board had released a draft plan two weeks ago because our federal grant funding said we had to do that, even though the CDC hadn't even released the latest draft yet, which they just released Friday.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And now everybody's mad because they don't match up.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was the government kind of created that problem for us.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we we have to try to figure that out with limited resources.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: And and and schools do not employ lots of public health experts, that's not their wheelhouse.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now you you're just dumping it on them.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm a little irritated with the CDC dumping a bombshell on a Friday with no support to help us out, you know.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um I was gonna ask you about that.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: Is as being somebody on the school board, it's gonna be really hard to start one way and then have a implement a phase change a month or two later, isn't it?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they they don't they're the people the CDC are not being pragmatic and realizing what has to happen on the ground to put together a surveillance system for a district of 42,000 kids and over 60 buildings, that doesn't happen in a week.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just buy it off the shelf.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you needed to have been planning this out.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they have they've had surveillance testing as a recommendation for months, but no guidance on where to go buy you know saliva testing.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you go buy to wastewater surveillance test?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you buy that?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can't buy that off the shelf right now.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just go to Amazon and get it.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's gonna take us some time.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Were you thinking that through?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So there's not a lot of people thinking through the logistics, and schools are just gonna have this dumped on them in a month.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and oh, by the way, there's all the controversy around critical race theory and equity and sex ed and property taxes and everything else, too.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, throw that at everybody too.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, by the way, these school boards, we're not paid to do this.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is a volunteer job we do in dish of our day jobs.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: We're supposed to figure this all out, and so uh, so there's a lot of unrealistic expectations totally dumped on the schools.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, without any help from the field of public health, honestly.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, who's doing it right?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, there's different countries doing a good job.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, Germany's doing a pretty good job, for example.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, some Asian like New Zealand, Australia, you know, Japan did they did a really good job with their public health efforts, but they're doing a really bad job with vaccinations.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I my oldest daughter lives there, by the way.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been interesting seeing her commentary living in Kyoto, seeing this go right and not go right, depending on the issue.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, like uh Norway has done a beautiful job.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're one of the best countries, and which is odd because Sweden has done a horrible job.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: They're pretty culturally similar, and one got it right, one got it wrong.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a bad leadership and bad decision making.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's it, it's you know, it's I guess at least fascinating to see who's getting it right and who's getting it wrong.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And because you have access to this data, you can run the numbers yourself.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the things I try to do.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: I tell people, you know, at the end of the day of public health, it's dead, not dead.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever had the who had the least not dead, they're the ones who are winning and they're the ones who write.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: You can have theory you want, but at the end of the day, it's dead, not dead, just like a football game.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: The end of the day, it's a scoreboard.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're if you lose, you lose.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And you you thought you had the greatest strategy, obviously it didn't work.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um talking about strategy, what's happened is happened.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, I I I live on the philosophy you can't live life looking in a rearview mirror, you have to look through the front windshield.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: But that said, if we had as a country, if we had to approach it again, what type of strategy do you think would have been the most sensible strategy for us to take with this?
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, the the biggest mistakes made initially is we just didn't have testing to even figure out how where we were at.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we probably closed some schools prematurely.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: In Lincoln, for example, we probably didn't have to close so rapidly.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: New York waited too long.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's why they had so many dead people that waited too long.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: But but we were all flying blind because we had no testing.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so without that testing to know when it was, where it was, how fast it was, everybody was flying blind for months.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so the probably the one of the biggest mistakes was not having a testing system up and running.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's what South Korea, they had everything run up with drive-up testing within within a month before we'd even had one test anybody could get anywhere.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so the testing was a huge failure.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the second big failure was the politicization of wearing a mask.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that a political statement?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a piece of cloth.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, I grew up washing mash, honeycut, and pierce war with war with those things, and they seem to do just fine.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: They've been used in surgery for 100 years and nobody's killed over dead.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've never had a disability.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: My wife or I both have never seen any disability from occupations that wear masks, and it's not just medical folks.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's people who do, you know, sanitation, people who do asbestos mitigation.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: A mask isn't gonna kill you.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then they're, I don't know, they're so obsessed about Fausty changing his mind.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, people get things wrong.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's why are you still obsessed about the fact that he said no, then yes?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Have you never been wrong in your life, too?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the data is pretty solid.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Masks worked.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my my big worry is though, will they work against dense the delta variant?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's what's really worrying me right now.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they're pretty effective about against the original strain.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know about this new variant, which is much, much more infectious.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: I hope it would still work.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but we don't know yet.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: But again, that's one of our best proven things we got right now.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: We got to go with it.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was scary times.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't typically talk about what I do for my day job on the podcast.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: We'll just say I work with the public myself.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it it might be in the retail environment.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: And our business like tripled when everything started to shut down, our business tripled.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a madhouse every single day.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: And all my my colleagues, they also run retail environments as well.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: And um one of the things that we really wish would have happened, particularly in the state of Nebraska when we got to the heat of it, was maybe a shelter in place plan or a limited, yeah, I don't know, like a limited window when certain businesses could be open just to kind of control that risk.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Did you ever see Nebraska heading towards like a shelter in place order at any point in time?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, and I actually came about a number of deaths that said we don't need it, and it's because we have we have more space.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like my my to work is walking and there's plenty of space.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we we had neighborho driveway socials the whole pandemic because we just sit in the driveway on our chairs with our cooler, six plus feet apart outside is fine.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh now if you're in a New York City high rise, it's a different story.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so people have to realize the decision you make depends partly on where you live.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: What you do in New York is totally different than Lincoln, is totally different than Valentine, Nebraska.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's okay, actually.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so to make an intelligent decision based on where you live.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: So people have this one size fits all.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: People from Valentine think everybody should do what Valentine does.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: People in New York think everybody should do what New York does.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're all three different situations.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so people need to realize your strategy will change based on the situation.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just like if Coach Frost is playing a run-heavy team, he's gonna have a different strategy if he's playing against a pass heavy team.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: If it's raining and windy, chances are you're not gonna pass as much.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so people need to adapt the strategy based on the conditions.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: You don't just get to make it up and say we're going with this no matter what.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you could, but you're gonna lose, which is what we did.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, right.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: You need to based on the conditions.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, an interesting thing that could come up again uh because of the incubation cycle of the virus.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: One of the proposals which makes some sense that we may have to revert to some time is open four days, close 10 days.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because you'd open up four days, the people who are gonna get infected would get infected in that interim, stay home then, take them out of circulation.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the other People could come out again before it.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that was an interesting, they had some pretty good math behind it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: That might be a strategy we could turn to.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say this gets worse.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have to start over with vaccines and masks don't work.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: We may have to do a four-day on, 10-day off thing.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that there are it could I hope it doesn't get that bad, but that's in the realm of possibility.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we may have to do things like that, actually.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: So how is your quality of life, the things that you enjoy doing, how is that impacted by all of this?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um like everybody, stress was, I mean, work hours.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't get to take the vacation I had hoped to take.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's been hard.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I have three daughters who live on three continents, so we don't get to see our children.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't seen my daughter in Japan for almost two years.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's that's been hard.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, some things got better.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we we were lucky to get my wife a decent new bike when that all started.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we bike a lot more.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess we're we're getting more exercise and biking a lot.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've covered every bike mile of bike trail in Lincoln at least once, if not a couple times.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that's actually a good thing.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's it's a mixed bag, you know.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, like actually, from a business standpoint, our business did okay, actually.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, we got more work to do.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that I guess that's good.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh of my three kids, two of them, the pandemic was actually a good thing and one was a bad thing.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one, my daughter who had graduated, was just starting her career, that totally screwed up her and her her fiance's uh jobs.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: So they've been struggling uh because of that.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: My my middle daughter, though, she lost her internship, which was initially bad, but then what she ended up doing is going to Flagstaff with her boyfriend, and they had the best son they ever had.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now she realized they they love Flagstaff.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: That might have been the best thing that ever happened to, actually.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, my youngest daughter decided to apply to a different college and got in, and it was a where she really, we really wanted to go in in the end.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I so some people turn this around.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like I have some friends who work in other industries, like insurance, for example.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of them found out that actually they were just as productive, if not more productive, working remotely.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And now they're gonna save a lot of money on space because they don't have to rent as much space and equipment and people don't have to commute so much.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: So there are some good things we learned out of the pandemic.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think the tech community is kind of celebrating that for those reasons, you know, working from home, satellite jobs proof remote works, yay! Yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's I and I'm glad you you got to that point because uh part of the antithesis of my podcast, you know, I was a musician for 20 some years, and this was kind of a creative outlet that I was longing for over probably the past three or four years.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: But the pandemic finally forced me to pull the trigger.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's it was like, okay, get comfortable with being uncomfortable, let's get this thing done.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things we talk about on every single episode is the silver lining you've kind of taken from this whole pandemic experience, uh, more family time, uh, getting into creative endeavors, getting outside more.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: But uh yeah, so I'm glad to hear all those things.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the only music that I musicians initially had it hard, but I like the creative stuff.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: So one thing we did last summer is we went to the winery things where you sat outside.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Bands were playing again, and but we were all outside where it was safe.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think you have a lot more outdoor concerts than you used to.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think almost every winery around Lincoln, Nebraska started doing that now like once a week.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're in the starting swing where everything like Deer Springs and Glacial Till and James Arthur, those are fun to go to.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't have done those front of our not helped here yet.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we find we really enjoy those actually.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: So trying to keep it all positive.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um how bad is it gonna get?
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so far, I mean, I it is true that the most of us will be okay, but there were a lot of us who will not be.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we've lost over 600,000 Americans.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we're gonna hit another 600 unless we go all the way back to square one with vaccines, but it wouldn't surprise me if we had another 100,000 to the death toll, you know.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: In Nebraska, we're about 2,500.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: I thought we had a really good shot of making sure that wouldn't go above 3,000.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna bet if this delta takes off and leaks in Nebraska, what if we follow Arkansas and Missouri, we're probably gonna go past 3,000, unfortunately.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the thing that's people are not thinking about, and I have a person who works in insurance, this is what they're worried about, is long COVID.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that it that yes, you didn't die from it, but there's about 10% of people are having symptoms that last months, uh, and they don't know if that's permanent or not.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: There are potentially increasing rates of uh diabetes, heart disease, uh, some mental decline, some uh lung damage could be permanent.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of disability uh going forward.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of the things that's that's one of those sleeping giants.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just ripping off the bandblade, I just I'll just get infected and take my chances.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, people have to realize you took your chance, now you're gonna have to take it again, and you may have to take it yet again.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And each time you could get long COVID.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: So people are forgetting that.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Just because you didn't die doesn't mean you're you're all fine.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um still the majority of us are gonna be fine.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, civilization will go on.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: We the most of history is pandemic after pandemic after pandemic.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's but we're still here.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: So uh so it won't be the end of the world, but hopefully we'll start being more intelligent about it at some point.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: You're 80 videos in.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: Are you gonna keep making the videos?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'll do one later this week.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'll probably talk about the let the numbers with Delta going up and this challenge the schools are gonna be faced with with and what those CDC guidelines actually say, because I don't think a people a lot of people have read them though, and it's not with what the public party line is in Nebraska right now.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna point that out, which will be awkward.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it needs to be said.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so you know, I was hoping I was gonna be done at 50, then I was hoping it'd be done at 75.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: I really hope I'm done by 100.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was just gonna ask that.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, was there any point in all of this where you're just like, I'm throwing the talent, I'm done?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've come close, you know.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like even uh doing a road trip last year, I figure, you know, maybe I should just I'll just hop on my bike and I'll just ride around for a and uh you know well if I talked my wife into it too, but you know, we don't need we can just we can live on not much.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just come back when the world's figured this out.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're tempted at sometimes, but uh uh but that's not probably realistic, even though you dream of it.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: So you know, I read a journal star article with you.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: You sat down and had coffee with somebody from the journal star, and one of the things that you talked about was how society has gotten itself into such a selfish place, and that you know, sometimes finding purpose is serving others and in servitude to others, and I really appreciate that.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I I wanted to let you know that uh even if you did ever think about throwing in the towel with it, there's a good handful of us that would miss those video updates.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I probably couldn't do it for long anyway, but you know, always gotta come back.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks for doing the podcast.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate this, and I appreciate you making the time for me today.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: All right, welcome.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a good conversation.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Victor Hugo, who was the author of Les Miserables, had a quote that said, Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in this interview with Dr.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: Bob Rouner, I hope my listeners have learned maybe the worst isn't over yet and that we should still proceed with some sensible caution.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was a pleasure having him on the show today.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: I've been following his videos for over a year now, and I really enjoy the content.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: I would suggest that all of you search him out on YouTube.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's something worth learning in every video that he posts.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Speaking of good content, I hope you are giving me a like, follow, subscribe on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and on YouTube.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Search me out, follow me, and I'm always seeking out the ever-elusive five star review on Apple Podcasts.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: This has been Caught on the Mic with Michael Clark.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: I am Michael Clark.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.