For nine weeks, Lincoln Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird and interim Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Director Pat Lopez made daily on-camera appearances, with a focus on keeping residents tuned in as the coronavirus pandemic raged.
The pair's tandem exit from the daily news conference is a physical sign of their commitment to remain in sync leading the city through this historic emergency.
Since early March, the duo have been making some of the toughest decisions about how to mitigate spread of the virus by restricting events, closing businesses and finally beginning to relax rules. To focus on public health, they say they have prioritized clear communication about what is known and what is being done.
Ultimately, the solution required collaborative work across the public and private sectors and a community empowered by reliable information, they said.
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"This isn't a response that is going to get accomplished by one mayor or one public health director or one health care leader or one doctor," Gaylor Baird said in an interview late last month. "It is everyone weaving together the assets that they bring to this fight."
Through Saturday, Lancaster County had recorded 1,329 cases of COVID-19.
Dr. George Hansen, president of the Lancaster County Medical Society, said Gaylor Baird and Lopez have helped guide Lincoln through the pandemic and shepherded a community response that has limited the number of sick people.
He applauded the tough decisions made early and continually and their communication with the public as well as area medical providers.
"Gosh, I think (they) have done a pretty amazing job from my standpoint," Hansen said.Â
"There’s really no textbook for this."
Feeling the gravity of the pandemic
Shortly after she was sworn in as mayor last May, Gaylor Baird called on Lopez to step in and lead the local health department when Director Shavonna Lausterer took a leave of absence for breast cancer. She later died.
By year's end, Gaylor Baird asked Lopez if she'd remain in her interim post after a national search for a permanent director failed to find a good fit.
Lopez agreed, with a few conditions, and the first-term mayor said she believes that unsuccessful search was a blessing in disguise.
Lopez, a nurse who worked for nearly 30 years at the health department, knew the work and had contacts throughout the Lincoln community. Her consulting work to help health departments elsewhere in Nebraska gain accreditation also gave Lopez invaluable relationships, the mayor said.
To keep her on, Gaylor Baird agreed to let Lopez work more part-time so she could spend time with her grandchildren and also continue her consulting work. The mayor also promised Lopez she could take her 12-year-old grandson to California in March to see the ocean and go to Disneyland.
As talk about the coronavirus began in January, Lopez began to feel trepidation about the scheduled vacation, she said.
The arrival of coronavirus in Nebraska on March 6 kept her from flying out that day, and instead sent Lopez and the mayor to the state Capitol.
Gov. Pete Ricketts convened a meeting with Gaylor Baird, Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert, their respective staffs and University of Nebraska Medical Center's Dr. James Lawler, an infectious disease expert who in February helped investigate coronavirus aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship. He painted a stark picture for the group, Gaylor Baird said.
Though the public at the time generally thought of the virus as akin to the flu, Lawler laid out how this virus threatened the collapse of the entire health care system, she said.
"I walked out of that meeting with a whole different sense of the gravity of the situation," Gaylor Baird said.
Putting the plan into action
The mayor and Lopez made protecting residents vulnerable to the virus and shoring up the local hospital system their priorities in the local pandemic response.
Gaylor Baird began poring over pages of the health department's recently revised 2018 pandemic influenza response guide, which served as a manual for the health department's coordinated community response, she said.
The mayor also relied on conversations she had with emergency personnel in the early months of her administration, when they discussed the response to the historic 2019 flooding in Nebraska.
And her involvement in the national Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative taught her and 40 other mayors about crisis management. They studied cases such as the 2010 rescue of trapped Chilean miners and learned how to build unity and support recovery in the aftermath of mass shootings, she said.
Plus, she was able to lean on the humble but knowledgeable Lopez and a health department team of unsung heroes who have trained their entire careers for this, she said.
Lopez managed an outbreak response in the 1990s, after University of Nebraska-Lincoln college students returned from spring break and spread the measles, she said.
She knew firsthand about contact tracing for sexually transmitted diseases and managing clinics, and she and her department had the mayor's trust, Lopez said.
Gaylor Baird has joined health department staff on Saturdays for four- to five-hour strategy sessions during the pandemic, and she grasped the importance of public health measures and metrics, Lopez said.
The first confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. came in February, and to a degree, Gaylor Baird and Lopez had the benefit of time in preparing their pandemic actions because of the delayed arrival of the coronavirus in Lincoln.
But once it arrived in Nebraska, it prompted big decisions and gave little time for study or prolonged analysis, the mayor said. Like the March 11 decision to restrict attendance at the boys state high school basketball tournament to players' family members.
On that call, they threaded the needle between risking mass spread of the coronavirus in the state and crushing the spirit of high school basketball players who had worked so hard to make it to the tournament, said the mayor, herself a former high school basketball player.
"That decision made (the pandemic) feel real for a lot of people," Gaylor Baird said.
Later that month, the recommendation to limit gatherings to 10 people or fewer became a mandate when Lopez's staff confirmed the first community spread case of the coronavirus in Lincoln.
The discovery triggered the closure of businesses such as nail salons, barbershops and tattoo parlors and made restaurants go to take-out and delivery only.
Lopez's directed health measure even put her husband, Joe, a barber, temporarily out of work.
Alignment over dysfunction
Cases continued to rise through April and, as the end of the city's first restrictions approached in early May, an outbreak at the Smithfield meatpacking plant in Crete continued to infect more Lancaster County residents who work there.
While Gaylor Baird and Lopez expressed concern over local trends, Ricketts said he would begin easing restrictions May 11, allowing restaurants to resume dining service and allowing barbers, nail technicians, massage therapists and tattoo artists to reopen their shops.
The Republican governor pinned his decision to the strength of the hospital system in Lincoln, which has maintained the ability to treat new patients.
New case totals and a climbing infection rate gave Gaylor Baird and Lopez pause, but they reluctantly agreed to adopt rules aligning with the governor's.
"We didn’t think that a legal battle over an extra week or two was in the end going to serve our community well," Gaylor Baird said, noting the virus' presence in the community isn't going away.
And the Democratic mayor remembered early briefings from public health experts about the importance of not quarantining too long and risking a fatigue that results in souring of public compliance, she said.
Having separate state and local rules over what's allowed during the pandemic would cause confusion for not only residents, but also Lincoln police officers who ultimately are tasked with enforcing these orders, she said.
"I didn't want that kind of dysfunction if Pat didn't say it was absolutely necessary," the mayor said. "And she thought that kind of legal battle or friction for one or two weeks was not going to be worth it, and instead try and get this message out to the public so they would continue to stay with us."
From his viewpoint, Hansen, a family practice doctor in Lincoln, said Lopez and Gaylor Baird made the politically correct decision and the most effective decision.
"Are you going to have a police officer posted at every corner?" he asked.
Both Lopez and Gaylor Baird noted the sacrifices made by business owners and residents, many of them voluntarily.
They have sought to communicate the effectiveness of those quarantine efforts and business closures while also acknowledging the virus won't just go away, and Lincoln needs to learn to live with it, Lopez said.
"It is walking a fine line," Lopez said.
Directed health measures will go away at some point, which is why the city created the coronavirus "risk dial" to help forecast for people the level of threat in the community as businesses resume under modified operations and health officials ask residents to wear masks.
"We need the public to stay with us," Gaylor Baird said.
'When this is all over'
Gaylor Baird has kept a magnet in her mayoral office with a motto she's clung to during this pandemic: "Be you."
Stressful situations can bring out the worst in people, and accounts of the 1918 pandemic feature examples of shameful treatment of sick people, she said.
This pressure, though, has also provided an opportunity to bring out the best in a community.
While the pandemic has magnified health, social and economic disparities across the community, Gaylor Baird hopes city, business, community and health officials can improve Lincoln as they plan the recovery from this pandemic, she said.
Gaylor Baird has focused part of her daily message at the microphone on highlighting the good deeds big and small from children to philanthropists.
She's proud of Lincoln and wants those stories known, she said.
"When this is all over, I want history books to look at Lincoln with admiration and feel inspiration by the kind of community we are and by the kind of values we demonstrate," Gaylor Baird said.