The drivers of Santa Clara County’s economy - tech companies, foreign travel and close human interaction - made it a ripe target for the coronavirus. If she could have locked down sooner, she told them, she would have.Ĭalifornia How Silicon Valley became California’s epicenter of the coronavirus Matt Willis, Marin County’s public health officer, who contracted COVID-19 days later.Ĭody told her colleagues that Italy was under siege, and her county was just two weeks away from a similar fate. “We knew that it would be a matter of time before that was our experience,” said Dr. But decades of experience had shown the health officers that while they represent different jurisdictions, they are one region when it comes to infectious diseases. “It felt huge to me,” she recalled, “because I knew how disruptive it would be.”Įlsewhere in the region, diagnosed cases were sparse. Sara Cody, the county’s public health officer. But as they discussed the exponential increase in Santa Clara County cases, where the hospitals were becoming overwhelmed by infected patients falling ever sicker, what they needed to do “started to crystallize,” said Dr. The coalition of county public health officers didn’t set out to lock down the Bay Area that fateful Sunday morning in mid-March. Now, as officials nationwide weigh how to lift isolation orders as the rate of COVID-19 transmission slows - and protests against the orders mount - the Bay Area is again poised to lead, but with a warning: All of this could be for naught if it isn’t done right. “We all wish we did not have to do this.” “This was one exhausting and difficult day for all of us,” Aragón later wrote in his journal. New York came next, as have dozens of states since. Gavin Newsom followed with his own order for California. Together, they would issue the nation’s first stay-at-home order, probably saving thousands of lives and charting the course for much of the country.
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