Many in Midwest nonchalant about virus

Medical professionals fret amid steep jumps

ELMWOOD, Neb. — Danny Rice has a good sense of how dangerous the coronavirus can be.

What puzzles him are the people who have curtailed so much of their lives to avoid being infected by the virus.

“I’m not going out and looking to catch it,” he said, sitting at a cluttered desk in his auto repair shop in the tiny eastern Nebraska community of Elmwood. “I don’t want to catch it. But if I get it, I get it. That’s just how I feel.”

Plenty of people agree with Rice, and health experts acknowledge those views are powering soaring COVID-19 infection rates, especially in parts of the rural Midwest, where the disease is spreading unabated and threatening to overwhelm hospitals.

It’s not that people in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa and elsewhere don’t realize their states are leading the nation in new cases per capita. It’s that many of them aren’t especially concerned.

Wayne County, home to 6,400 people in southern Iowa, has the state’s second-highest case rate, yet its public health administrator, Shelley Bickel, says mask-wearing is rare. She finds it particularly appalling when she sees older people, who are at high risk, shopping at a grocery store without one.

In part, though, some of those views are hard to fight because of the reality that many people have no symptoms, and most of those who do get sick recover quickly. And treatment advances mean that those who become seriously ill are less likely to die from the virus than when it first emerged in the spring. Even though the number of cases and the death toll are rising, infectious disease experts note that death rates appear to be falling.

Even as virus rates have soared in the Midwest, the Republican governors of Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota have ruled out requiring masks in all public places, though

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds this week required masks for indoor events with more than 25 people and outdoor events of more than 100 people.

Iowa schools are exempted, and bars and restaurants are only required to ensure social distancing. Meanwhile, North Dakota’s Republican governor, Doug Burgum, imposed statewide mask and business restrictions on Friday after resisting doing so for months. The state had only nine free Intensive Care Unit hospital beds as of Friday.

Although doctors and public health officials have criticized the governors for their lack of action, voters in all of the states last week delivered sweeping victories to Republicans, including President Donald Trump, who has mocked mask wearing and downplayed the seriousness of a pandemic that has killed more than 240,000 people.

That has left Midwest medical professionals wondering how they will reverse a tide of people being treated for the coronavirus if residents of their states still aren’t taking the illness seriously.

Grant Schulte The Associated Press Danny Rice, 67, discusses the coronavirus in his auto repair shop in downtown Elmwood, Nebraska. Rice has continued his life as normal during the pandemic, even though he recognizes that the virus is potentially dangerous for high-risk people, including him.