Bryan Health celebrates a COVID milestone: no hospitalizations

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – Bryan Medical Center reported on Wednesday that no one is hospitalized with COVID-19 for the first time since 2020.

Over the last three years, the hospital has cared for over 4,000 people suffering from the illness.

“It’s been a journey over three years of time, from when this first began and 2020,” Chief Medical Officer Dr. John Trapp said. “For us, I realized the virus first identified in 2019, but just how rapidly we had to adapt to changing times.”

The news comes just days after the Lincoln City Council voted to end the city’s state of emergency for COVID-19 and just a day before the Biden administration allows the public health emergency to expire.

It all marks a new era in the fight against the virus that had a grip on the nation for three years.

Trapp said getting to this point has been a long battle.

“That was really an interesting time of learning for us and evolving as a health care system, from drive-thrus to screenings that we were able to do,” he said.

Trapp said it was an exciting but “precarious” time.

“How do we procure safety equipment masks, N95 masks, gowns, those types of things?” he said. “A lot of innovation happened.”

He said despite all the difficulty, the statewide collaboration was incredible.

“How we collaborated with our rural hospitals in transferring patients when they got critically ill patients, that was a journey,” Trapp said.

He said the pandemic highlighted the value of community outreach, collaboration and more.

Trapp pointed to the speed at which the vaccine was produced and distributed.

“Using technology that had been around, but we applied it a new way,” he said.

So where are we today with the virus?

Trapp said it people will still get it, and some will have worse infections than others.

“We’re going to continue to live with this, I believe, for months, if not years going forward,” he said. “And just like other types of viral infections that we’ve seen, from time to time, we’re going to continue to see some ebbs and flows.”

More information on how to continue staying safe from COVID can be found here.