A year later, officials reflect on the day they shut Bay Area down
In a year framed by nearimpossible choices in the coronavirus pandemic — between saving lives and causing widespread economic and social devastation — the decision to issue the first shelterinplace order in the United States and shut down the Bay Area ended up being one of the easiest, said Dr. Sara Cody.
It didn’t feel that way on the gray and cold morning of March 16, when the order was announced. Cody, the Santa Clara County health officer, and her peers from six other Bay Area health jurisdictions, had barely slept. They’d spent the entire day before, a Sunday, crafting the health order, and the county lawyers had stayed up all night finetuning the language.
“We barely had time for the ink to dry before we ran downstairs and gave the press conference,”
Cody said in a recent interview.
The announcement came at noon. Just before, she recalled, she was in a conference room with the other health officers — from Alameda, Marin, Contra Costa, San Francisco and San Mateo counties, and from the city of Berkeley. They sat around a table, quietly exhausted, Cody said, “and we looked at each other, like, ‘Are we really going to do it?’ ”
The days leading up to March 16, 2020, had unfolded in a series of unsettling revelations about how far the coronavirus had spread into the Bay Area, and how much damage it could do once it got a foothold in a community. Cases were climbing exponentially in Santa Clara County, an early epicenter in the Bay Area.
It was the same week that the pandemic exploded into the national consciousness: In one day, the NBA halted play midseason and thenPresident Donald Trump stopped travel from Europe. On Monday, March 9, Cody announced the first death of someone from COVID19 in her county and issued her first health order: banning gatherings over 1,000
people.
That Friday, March 13, Cody limited gatherings to fewer than 100 people. She said she teared up during the news conference announcing the order, when it hit her midspeech just how many activ
ities it would shut down. “It was the first but not the last time I choked up,” she said.
She doesn’t remember much about March 14 — only that she’s certain something else unsettling must have occurred, to further ratchet up her concern. The morning of March 15, the San Francisco health officer — Dr. Tomás Aragón, now the state health officer — sent her a text. He wanted to talk to Cody and Dr. Scott Morrow, the San Mateo County health officer, about agreeing on a limit to crowd sizes, since everyone was issuing different orders and people were becoming confused.
They got on a call, and “between 8 or 9 in the morning and 11, we went from aligning on the number to ‘No, no, no, we just have to shelter in place,’ ” Cody said. They started calling other health officers to make it a regional thing, but Cody didn’t want to extend it too far and risk overly complicating the order.
“I was extremely worried about how fast we could move,” she said. She knew that even a day or two further delay could be the difference be
tween shutting down spread of the virus and giving it just enough space to blow up and overwhelm hospitals.
That difference, indeed, would play out in New York City, which shut down only a few days after the Bay Area but suffered far more widespread illness and death.
“Never would I have imagined on that Friday the 13th that over the next 48 hours I would be concluding that our best option, and really our only option, was a full shelterinplace,” Cody said.
“But at that time we had very little testing, so we had enough information to know that we were likely in very bad shape, but not enough to measure how bad,” she said. “We had no treatment, no vaccine, we didn’t have enough personal protective equipment. We just didn’t have the tools. And
shelter in place, that’s a pretty big tool to use, but very effective.”
Compared to some of the decisions she would face later in the pandemic — when and how to reopen, what to do about schools, what kinds of social activities to allow (she’s still not convinced indoor dining is a good idea) — shutting down the county “was one of the easiest and cleanest decisions,” she said.
Dr. Lisa Hernandez, the Berkeley health officer, said she was similarly both dismayed by and resigned to their decision. “What we ended up doing — what impact it had, economically and emotionally on the community,” she said, and paused for a moment. “It was essentially a life or death situation. But it was dreadful.”
“We needed to be really aggressive. And we needed to do everything we could to keep this virus from taking hold,”
said Dr. Grant Colfax, head of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “No one can take any of these things lightly. At the end of the day, the question was what was the best way to save lives.”
A year later, the Bay Area in many ways has dodged the worst of the pandemic that struck much of the country with deadly force. The nine counties have among the lowest death rates in the United States, especially compared to other places that experienced repeated waves of infection.
Colfax said he’s proud of what San Francisco and the rest of the region accomplished with their early actions, and their commitment to public health throughout the pandemic. Cody said she’s pleased by that too, but at the same time, she can’t help feeling disappointed that they never managed to stamp out the virus completely.
Throughout the pandemic, Cody has been a steadfast voice of caution and grim warnings: from national TV appearances to local news conferences and livestreamed updates to her Board of Supervisors. For a long time, she was convinced that with strong federal leadership and commitment nationwide to wearing masks, avoiding gatherings and building up public health resources, the virus could be contained.
But that never happened, and the Bay Area couldn’t do it on its own. “You can’t fight a global pandemic county by county by county,” she said.
“I held this idea for longer than you’d think: that we had a way forward, and that people would shelter and protect themselves and protect each other. And then I realized, oh, there’s a national narrative, and not everyone thinks this is a good idea,” Cody said. “It took me a long time to wrap my head around that and understand that we weren’t going to lick this thing in two months.”
Still, a year into the pandemic, she’s optimistic, and that carries through in her public appearances. She grins behind her mask at news conferences, and in a brief phone interview she laughed and joked. When she tears up now, it’s as likely to be good news as bad.
A couple of weeks ago she drove down to Morgan Hill for a mobile vaccination clinic for farmworkers at Monterey Mushrooms. “We’re vaccinating a thousand ag workers we’ve been desperately worried about for a year,” she said, the smile audible in her voice. “Who would have imagined that?”