When it comes to COVID-19 transmission, is Nebraska the safest place in the nation?
All week, maps from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have made it look as though much of Nebraska is largely free of COVID-19 problems.
As of Friday’s map, 60 of the state’s 93 counties were colored blue, indicating low transmission levels. In fact, Nebraska accounts for the majority of such counties nationwide, with only 39 other blue counties in the rest of the nation.

“The color blue on the map may not be an accurate representation of transmission rates,” said Olga Dack, a spokeswoman for the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services.
Instead, Nebraska counties are showing up in the low transmission category for a combination of reasons, including the state’s decision to retire its COVID-19 dashboard.
Dack said the CDC had relied on Nebraska’s dashboard. This week, she said, the state discovered that the federal agency had responded to the state’s dashboard change by using an alternate measure — percentage of positive COVID-19 tests — to assign transmission categories to Nebraska counties. Thus, county-level Nebraska data currently showing on the CDC website reflect the positivity rate, not the per capita case counts reported for most other states. The CDC also stopped factoring in very small numbers, Dack said.
Nebraska continues to report county-level COVID case data separately to the CDC, she said, but the CDC hasn’t been using it for some technical reasons.
The result: Nebraska looks like an island of blue in the center of a map dominated by red, high-transmission counties.
The CDC had not responded Friday to several requests for information.
Meanwhile, Nebraska health care providers and a group of lawmakers are asking Gov. Pete Ricketts to reinstate the dashboard, saying the data is crucial for schools, businesses and hospitals making operational decisions during the pandemic.