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 as sick passengers sent SOSs on social media, 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 last week. “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 in the Bay Area and California 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 counterpart in Marin County, Dr. Matt Willis, who retired last year, went a step further.
“A lot of our early thinking was organized almost purely around preventing transmission,” Willis said. “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.”
Alcohol and drug use surged as people struggled with isolation. California schoolchildren, some of the last to return to the classroom, are still lagging behind in learning proficiency.
Like other health officers across the state, who until then remained largely invisible to the public, Cody became a target of violent death threats and required round-the-clock security.
The political backlash to the lingering lockdowns has been seismic, and has been blamed, by some, for some of the new Trump administration’s most draconian cuts to federal funding for public health agencies and spurred fears that any future pandemic response could be crippled. Trump’s nominee for National Institutes of Health director, Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, frequently criticized California’s extended lockdown as having “inflicted enormous harm,” especially on the state’s poor.
“There were a lot of damaging aspects of our prolonged shutdowns — unfortunately, one of them was a loss in trust,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, a UCSF infectious disease expert who criticized some of the lockdown orders at the time. “All I’ve been doing for the last two and a half months is trying to fight what’s happening to medical research, to public health, and all I get is responses on Twitter that say, ‘It’s because you closed schools, it’s because you made us take the vaccine, it’s because you closed the beaches.’”
It even kept family members from the dying. Stacey Silva remembers watching helplessly at St. Louise Hospital in Gilroy where staff kept her from the bedside of her 66-year-old father, retired cabinetmaker Gary Young, as he succumbed to the virus on the first day of the lockdown, one of the Bay Area’s earliest victims. At first, a security guard barred her from even entering the hospital. “I said, ‘My dad is dying right now!’”
After a nurse scanned her temperature, she watched her father’s heart rate monitor go dark through a hallway window. The shutdown meant she couldn’t have a funeral or a memorial service — an indignity suffered by so many of the families who lost loved ones to the virus, which through February has killed 110,586 Californians.
But the shock of his death made Silva a public crusader for the lockdown rules after that — posting messages on Facebook about her loss.
“Look, this is just a normal guy, and he died from COVID,” she would say, “so just freaking take it seriously, alright?”
The Bay Area’s restrictions were intended to prevent the dire scenes playing out in Italy and then New York City — hospitals overwhelmed with patients, body bags piling up outdoors. For the most part, it worked. Event centers across the Bay Area were set up with cots as emergency wards but were never needed. California had among the country’s lowest COVID death rates, while large states that reopened sooner like Florida had some of the highest. Had California followed Florida’s pandemic response, the governor’s office said, 56,000 more Californians would have died. But critics cited studies that attributed California’s lower COVID death rates more to a younger, healthier population.
And the state’s restrictions weren’t without cost. Restaurants and salons that hung on with federal subsidies found they had lost their customer base when they finally reopened. California’s prolonged lockdown contributed to one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates, which remains stubborn at about 5.5%, and its struggles to return school attendance to pre-pandemic levels.
Alex Hult, who owned a string of Flights restaurants across the South Bay before recently selling off the last of them, understood the need for the initial shutdown. But he considered the later ones “nonsense.”
“Forcing restaurant owners to operate at 25% occupancy was a recipe for disaster,” he said. “Does it really matter if you’re staying 3 feet, 4 feet, 6 feet apart?”
In hindsight, both Cody from Santa Clara County and Willis from Marin County said they should have sought more community input, like Hult’s, as the months dragged on.
But Cody remains confident that her priorities were in the right place — and reflected the values of the majority of Bay Area residents at the time.
“At the end of the day, I value life, so that was really animating a lot of the decisions that I made,” Cody said. “But a couple years out, and certainly with what’s happening now, that’s not the value that everyone holds. Some people value liberty over life.”
Even among the Bay Area health officers, there were differences of opinion — mostly nuanced — when some counties, including San Mateo and Marin, broke away from Santa Clara County and followed the less restrictive state reopening orders.
Willis, who tested positive for COVID three days after the news conference announcing the historic regional shutdown, signed numerous waivers that allowed Marin County schools to become some of the first to open in the state.
Willis and Cody both agree that if they had to do it again, they would engage more with the community to build trust. That way, Willis said, people may be more likely to voluntarily agree to restrictions for the public good without mandates where “they felt their fundamental freedoms were being threatened.”
“We’re not going to do well just by saying, ‘Well, you’re wrong to feel that way,’” he said.
Of the original public health officers who made the unprecedented lockdown decision, Cody is the only one left still holding the same job. Last week, she announced her impending retirement and plans to write her memoirs. Alameda County’s Erica Pan moved on to become the state Public Health Officer.
Willis said the crisis brought them all so close that at the height of the pandemic, their meetings became “three-quarters strategy and one-quarter counseling — maybe 10% group therapy.”
To commemorate the 5-year anniversary of that momentous day, Willis is planning a reunion at his home. They will reflect on the decisions they made together, he said, and the ordeal that created a lasting bond.