Editor’s note: This is the first of two parts about the fifth anniversary since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
“I remember … kind of panic and shock when Dr. (Teresa) Frankovich, the health officer for Humboldt County at the time, called me,” Dr. Candy Stockton told the Times-Standard. “She called me and told me that we had diagnosed our first case of COVID in the county, and it was a patient I had collected a sample from the day before.
“So I have the dubious distinction of having actually tested and caught the first case of domestically acquired COVID in Humboldt County, something that I actually didn’t share with anyone for quite a while — because that wasn’t really a prize anyone wanted to win.”
Frankovich was just in her second month as the county’s part-time health officer when she was forced to declare a county-wide emergency, and she would resign just a few months later amidst both praise and scorn for her handling of the early days of the pandemic.
Now one of Frankovich’s successors as the county’s health officer with the Department of Health and Human Services, Stockton was then the chief medical officer for the Humboldt County Independent Practice Association. She recalls making the extremely difficult decision, during the first few months of the pandemic, to take on the task of treating COVID-19 patients separate from the rest of her organization’s staff.
“It was scary because doctors were dying at a higher rate than most people … and so there was a running publication in memoriam of the physicians around the world who had died (from) COVID,” Stockton said. “We made the decision in our clinic — we had a separate spot in our clinic that could be shut off from the rest of the clinic — that we would do most visits over telemedicine and that myself and one of my medical assistants would be the ones that saw (potentially infected patients).
“So for a year before vaccines became available, (we) saw every person who came into the office sick and needed to be tested. And that was … anxiety provoking, to say the least.”
Tory Starr, CEO of Open Door Community Health Centers, had just moved back to Humboldt County to become the chief of Open Door in 2020. He was tasked with negotiating an emerging health care crisis at one of Humboldt County’s most important bastions of community health.
He was in Sacramento negotiating funding for the organization’s Arcata clinic when news of COVID-19 really hit home.
“In my first 90 days as CEO … pandemic management was not something on the list of things that I was dealing with … that was when the first pro teams started canceling games, right?” Starr said. “First it was the NBA … then Major League baseball, and people didn’t really know what was going on.”
Starr said that when he learned of Los Angeles and San Diego County school closures, that was when the news became concrete to him.
“When schools close, the world stops,” Starr said. “I knew right then and there … The dominoes sort of went, and it’s hard … to resist. We knew that we were going to have a big workforce issue because we have all kinds of people who have school-age kids.”
Starr described that moment as the first of many “what are we going to do about this?” moments, as well as a transition that he characterized as “really difficult.”
“One of the big lessons we learned about this is you have to take care of your people (and) that means more than just work,” Starr said. “A pandemic impacts a community, not just an organization, and we’re part of that community .. and so we started asking ourselves ‘should we set up childcare and do it ourselves … can people work from home?’ … To have that just sprung is really difficult.”
Starr said that “nobody can do this by themselves,” and pointed to his doctor leadership team and colleagues “meeting every day to try and figure out what are the next steps and figure out how to keep our patients and our staff safe” as a key part of the community’s COVID response.
“It was really meeting every day, and trying to make the (appropriate) adjustments and learn as we went,” he said. “And if you’ve ever tried to put on a respiratory mask and goggles and work in those conditions, you know it’s super-hard … the general public didn’t see it as much as people who worked in hospitals.”
The emerging pandemic
Five years ago this month, the State of California issued lockdown restrictions to prevent the spread of a deadly, heretofore-unknown and highly infectious respiratory disease.
This “novel coronavirus,” which first emerged in China in the final month of 2019, immediately sent government agencies, health care professionals, media outlets and members of the public scrambling to interpret a set of circumstances that seemed almost apocalyptic.
On Feb. 4, 2020, the 3,711 passengers and crew of the British cruise ship “Diamond Princess” were put into quarantine; 700 became infected and nine died.
Feb. 20, 2020, the first Humboldt County resident was confirmed infected by the health department.
On March 4, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency after the death of a Rocklin man who had been exposed to the virus in mid-February.
Still, as reports of scattered pockets of cases circulated throughout the globe, it was unclear — even to seasoned health care professionals — to what extent the new virus would spread and impact their lives.
Stockton, was one of the people that experienced a sort of dramatic personal reckoning with the virus.
“In December of 2019, my siblings and I got together to give my mom her dream trip. The three of us were going to take her to Spain and spend two weeks there, and we were scheduled to leave about 16 hours after they closed international air travel,” Stockton said. “And mind you, I’ve been a practicing physician for over 20 years now, and I remember when West Nile Virus first hit the East Coast, and I remember thinking ‘they’re just being overly cautious; I cannot believe that they closed the airport … My mother is old enough she may not be able to do this again.’”
The disease, though, almost immediately revealed itself to be something greater than a vacation — even a vacation planned for a lifetime.
“Then … we started seeing the news coming out of Spain — Madrid, where we were supposed to be … just a couple days later, where people were very sick. Many people were dying. Travel was shut down throughout the country, and I was so incredibly grateful that they had closed the airports because we would have made it there just in time to get stranded with my elderly mother, long before vaccines became available, long before we knew how to treat COVID,” said Stockton.
By March 11, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the first in over a century since the “Spanish” influenza outbreak of 1918. That same evening, the National Basketball Association suspended its season after Rudy Golbert, then the center for the Utah Jazz, tested positive for COVID-19 — shortly after jokingly touching all the microphones of the press pool reporters in an effort to downplay the seriousness of COVID-related questions.
Two weeks later, on March 19, the state issued its “Safer at Home” lockdown order, instructing Californians to stay home except for necessary travel to obtain food, prescriptions or health care and when commuting to jobs considered essential to the public.
Over the course of the ensuing two years, health care officials scrambled to meet the challenges of the day while balancing the needs of the business community and workers, students, the elderly and the immunocompromised. In addition to the primary effects of COVID-19, increased isolation and anxiety associated with the pandemic took a serious toll on mental health. Overburdened health care and emergency services were stretched to their limits.
Efforts to reopen businesses stuttered. And the human toll continued to rise. During the week spanning January 9-15, 2021, 25,974 people across the nation — a population roughly the equivalent of the entire city of Eureka — died from COVID-19, according to the CDC. This would represent the peak of the pandemic.
Still, Starr said that in the ensuing months, people ignored the virus because it largely affected the elderly, the disabled and the immunocompromised.
In the ensuing months and years, vaccination efforts and herd immunity paid huge dividends, and the disease was brought down to a fraction of its former deadliness.
“We learned a lot from COVID,” Starr said. “Most people don’t understand that for the longest period of time, people lived to be about 25 (years old) … and then (we had these) main drivers of increased lifespan. One was clean water, (another) getting rid of sewage — and the third was vaccinations. .. if you chart that on human lifespan … people used to die of infectious diseases; they didn’t die of the wound they died of the infection.
“… and we essentially forgot about that because in the … highly developed countries, we started to worry about (issues like) heart disease, cancer — because we were living longer.”
State of Humboldt County today
“One of the most remarkable developments from this COVID-19 pandemic is (that) we can develop a vaccine in less than a year, now, through RNA technology,” Starr said. “That is phenomenal, and that is really a game-changer to develop a vaccine this quickly.
Still, Starr expressed skepticism about the state of information and misinformation about health and the diminishing returns for health policy professionals.
“We’ve politicized this so much; who would want to be a public health officer,” Starr said, “And I’m very concerned that we don’t trust science, and we always have to temper that science through the human side, and so much of medicine is about the human touch and … but underneath it all is science.”
Stockton, a long-time health care professional who joined the county as health official in 2022 and was a volunteer with the county throughout the first portion of the pandemic, says that the county is better prepared to deal with infectious disease, if only through sheer force of practice, than it was in the early days of 2020.
“I think living through a prolonged emergency gives you a very different understanding of what the challenges are and what the solutions to those challenges are,” Stockton said. “So I mean, for one thing, for the next 10 to 15 years, we’re all going to have this muscle memory from having responded to this, you know, very severe outbreak of an infectious disease.”
Stockton also noted that the pandemic highlighted the importance of trust in institutions like the county’s DHHS office.
Starr also notes that public health is at a crossroads, with faith in institutions dwindling and imperiling public health gains that had been disconcerting.
Robert Schaulis can be reached at 707-441-0585.
