Nebraska GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts told Newsmax on Tuesday that his state received an A+ grade from The Wall Street Journal's Editorial Board and praise from Politico in their scorecard because his state "took a balanced approached" to fighting COVID-19.
Ricketts claimed during an appearance on "Spicer & Co." that Nebraska's strategy of trying "to let people live a more normal life" while considering safety precautions allowed them to avoid prolonged statewide lockdowns and mask mandates.
"One of the things that we did is we really leveraged what we've done around process improvement, lean six sigma, or center of operational excellence," Ricketts said.
"All those lessons came in very handy as we assembled the team to respond. You know, we had to put a plan in place that had called for increasing our testing, our contact tracing, getting PPE, finding quarantine space, putting together plans for at-risk communities."
The governor added, by pegging directed health measures toward hospitalization rates rather than case counts or positivity rates, the state focused on statistics "that mattered."
"This was something where all the training we had done for the last few years before this really paid off," he concluded.
Ricketts also commented on him joining 25 other Republican governors in establishing the American Governors' Border Strike Force to organize "common-sense" immigration policy during the ongoing crisis at the southern border.
Nebraska sees the effect of the southern border "with just the human cost of the drug trafficking that's going on in our state," Ricketts said. "For example, the Omaha DEA last year pulled 26 kilograms of fentanyl, which is 10 times the amount that they had confiscated in 2020."
Ricketts continued with statistics in 2022: "So far through this year, the Omaha DEA has confiscated 100,000 counterfeit prescription pills laced with fentanyl, which is more through three months than they did all of last year."
"This goes to show you when you abdicate your responsibility like Biden has done on the southern border, drug cartels will push illegal drugs across the border," he added.
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