THE SMALL-TOWN LEADER JUDITH NISSULA Cascade, Idaho The town’s population 1,000: The town’s tagline “IDAHO’S YEAR-ROUND PLAYGROUND”: Early on, we had I hope people As I’ve looked We are a very My worry, People are like, Some people wonder Shortly before the pandemic, Nissula applied for Cascade to appear on a new HGTV show called The premise: to renovate an entire community in need. Home Town Takeover. “IT WASN’T CLEAR THAT THIS WOULD BECOME A PANDEMIC. PEOPLE WHO SAY THAT—THAT’S REVISIONIST THINKING.” THE ONE WHO CALLED IT HELEN BRANSWELL it might take time for it to adapt to efficiently infect people. The thinking would be that if you saw something early enough—and it looked like the Chinese had seen it pretty early—that you might be able to get a handle on it if you got rid of the source. apparent that by the time people thought this thing had zero problem moving from animals to humans, it was already a human pathogen. Boston Date she first publicly mentioned the virus, on Twitter “Hopefully this is nothing out of the ordinary. But a @ProMED_mail posting about ‘unexplained pneumonias’ in China is giving me #SARS flashbacks.” Number of COVID-19 stories she’d written by the time Trump declared a national emergency, on March 13 DECEMBER 31: HER TWEET: L AT E R , I T B E C A M E 41: clear that this was going to be a pandemic. People who say that—that’s revisionist thinking. “Well,everybodyshould have been focused on being ready.” Before then, probably. I do think people moved too slowly. I also think there was some denial involved. IT WASN’T IMMEDIATELY today about Ebola. It’s the first time since January 7 that I’ve written about anything that wasn’t COVID-related, if that gives you any indication. based in Toronto, and I covered the SARS outbreak there, in 2003. Even now, I can remember the points at which things happened in that outbreak. To the date. I struggle to remember if something happened in like January or February; it just all seems like one long month. It’s been a bit of a blur. Time has melted. of the emergence of a new disease, there’s good reason to think that I WROTE A STORY YOU MIGHT SAY, I USED TO BE whenChinalockeddown Wuhan [on January 23]. They were effectively crippling their economy. Nobody does that if you can avoid it. IT BECAME CLEAR W I T H T H I S O N E , While on a walk one evening in April, Branswell photographed the figures that make up the Boston Women’s Memorial, which includes this sculpture of Lucy Stone, a nineteenth-century suffragist and abolitionist. “They were all wearing masks,” Branswell tweeted. “Which is more than I can say for a lot of the Bostonians.” —As told to Dave Holmes AT T H E B E G I N N I N G 57 SUMMER 2020