Five years have passed since Bay Area public health officers gathered in San Jose on March 16, 2020, to make a stunning announcement.
By then, three people had died of COVID-19, and 273 had tested positive across the region. The Grand Princess cruise ship, which had circled for days off the Golden Gate Bridge with sick passengers, had finally docked in Oakland. Large gatherings had been banned and most schools across the region had closed.
Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s public health officer, took the podium with health officers from five neighboring counties standing 6 feet apart behind her and delivered an unprecedented order: a nearly complete shutdown of public life across the Bay Area.
Workplaces went remote. Freeways emptied. Nursing homes banned visitors. Churches streamed their services.
With no vaccine on the horizon or other tools to protect people from the highly contagious and deadly virus, Cody believed she had little other option.
“I’ve thought a lot about this,” Cody said in an interview this month. “And honestly, I would do it again.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom would follow that directive three days later with the country’s first statewide stay-home order. Within weeks, communities across the country followed with similar measures aimed at checking the disease’s exponential spread.
But what was supposed to be a three-week pause on normal life to relieve crowded emergency rooms stretched to a months-long slog of restrictions that lasted into June 2021, six months after vaccines became available, with mask and vaccine mandates stretching well into 2022, longer than in other states.
“The later decisions about when and how to reopen,” Cody conceded, “those were much more complicated.”
Her former counterpart in Marin County, Dr. Matt Willis, went a step further.
“A lot of our early thinking was organized almost purely around preventing transmission,” said Willis, who retired last year. “But I think we could have been more tolerant of certain forms of gatherings earlier on if we had recognized the benefits of those things.”