A Look Back One Year After Tuscaloosa's First Coronavirus Case

TUSCALOOSA, AL — I might've grown up in Tuscaloosa, but can't say I was here on March 13, 2020 when a news conference was called by Mayor Walt Maddox to announce the first local coronavirus case. The pandemic had officially come to town.

Instead, I was in a mostly empty bar in Mississippi, celebrating a buddy's birthday with a small group of friends on the last night it would be open ahead of the coming lockdown.

As the executive editor of two daily newspapers at the time, it's not like I wasn't prepared. I vividly remember the conversation I had in late January with local hospital officials, asking how important advanced media coverage could be in the event the virus made it to the states and our community. Journalism school textbooks will tell you to both avoid prompting an unnecessary panic while staying committed to transparency for your community.

Those textbooks were written before the pandemic, though.

"The last thing I want is to cause a stir and have every maw maw in the county wearing a mask at Walmart or terrified to go to eat downtown," I recall saying over the phone, my boots propped up on my desk and not really viewing it as anything more than a slow news day story.

I did still make it a point in early February to gather my staff and relay the potential gravity of what could be on its way, but I figured this would be another passing worry. After all, I had reported on the Ebola scare and even interviewed some of the world's leading epidemiologists and virologists at the Global Virus Network conference at Emory University during the height of fears over mosquito-borne viruses such as Zika and Chikungunya.

I went back to find my Associated Press coverage from that event in Atlanta and the first sentence of my story on May 3, 2016 brought so much full circle in an eerie way: "While Zika may be on the minds of researchers right now, little is known about what viruses could be on the horizon, making it a challenge to identify epidemics before they spread around the globe."

At the time I wrote it, I probably shrugged it off and filed the story without a second thought.

In the last year, though, I've seen friends not only lose jobs and entire businesses, but parents and loved ones. I've seen people dying from it with my own eyes and armed with nothing but a note pad, felt helpless to do anything about it. I also saw nearly every member of my immediate family catch the virus and missed Christmas with my Dad for the first time in my 31 years as he recovered from it.

That's my story, though, and not one that wholly relates to Tuscaloosa since I moved back to my hometown in August. So in an effort to provide the most accurate retrospective look at our community, I thought I would let some of the leaders on the front lines, along with some of my unsung friends in local media, tell their stories in their own words.

Describe the moment you realized the coronavirus pandemic was going to be serious.

Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox: "I think the moment for me came the night of the president's address to the nation, then you had surrounding that the Tom Hanks announcement, the NBA stopping. So the validation of the federal government as well as with entertainment and sports, we realized this was something that was going to happen and we needed to begin accelerating our efforts. Fortunately, we began planning in late February. We knew it would arrive it was just a matter of when. It was sickening, though, because you’re planning, preparing and making very difficult decisions against an invisible enemy that many believe was a hoax and at the same time you never separate the fact you’re a husband and father and my parents are in their late 70s and they live here."

Tuscaloosa News reporter Jason Morton: "It was kind of two-fold. I'm a big basketball fan and my schedule was such that I was going to be able to watch Alabama’s game in the SEC tournament. I think I had the day off. But I wake up and hear news the tournament has been canceled. We knew (the coronavirus) was coming for a while but that was the first obvious sign that this was getting very serious ... but when the mayor called the press conference on Friday the 13th, I remember looking at him — and I've known him for a while — and the last time I saw a look on his face close to that was the press conference he held after the [2011] tornado. We had our first confirmed case and it was real now."

DCH Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robin Wilson: "We had an idea of what was coming. There were three things that would make it different. One, we were one of the first sites to offer community COVID testing and we started keeping demographics for zip codes of our patients and it wasn't just Alabama it was Mississippi, Tennessee and people driving from other states. The second is when Mayor Maddox and the incident command team reached out in early April, saying we need to be approaching this from a logistics and community perspective, so we were interfacing with them on a regular basis. I think the third thing that really brought it home, in late May, around Memorial Day weekend, we had been running in the low 30s [for coronavirus hospitalizations] for a while and we felt that might be where we wind up and it was very doable. Then something unique happened and we had a spike in the low 80s. We realized we were starting to have surges from nursing homes, group homes, and longterm care facilities. I think that was the most definite wake up call. We approached this with the mindset that this was going to be a marathon race, not a quick one and done."

Tuscaloosa County Probate Judge Rob Robertson: "This time last year, we started reading news stories coming out of China in January and if the headlines were right this was going to be a large-scale event. In March of last year, the days were looking very concerning in the days we were going into. But now in March 2021, it's a much brighter outlook. The vaccinations are rolling out and there are a lot of positive trends. We committed to running all services of the county through this thing, and the challenge was we had to adapt and figure out how to do it as safely as possible, but provide the services people rely on ... But there were periods I would end up at three funerals on a weekend and those were not hopeful days. How much longer can you see the loss and illness families are enduring? But I truly believe those days seem to be coming to a close and our numbers sure look a whole lot better."

WVUA 23 reporter Chelsea Barton: "I kept trying to reassure myself it won’t get as bad as here. I have an April birthday and I thought surely by my birthday it should be over or I can go to that concert in May. It's so funny to look back and remember that mindset. We didn’t think it would take this toll on us. That first press conference seeing the fear in Mayor Maddox’s eyes and hearing Dr. Blake Lovely talk for the first time that night about how serious it was. I will never forget that the rest of my life. Seeing someone like Mayor Maddox, who I've covered for 10 years, and to see the concern in his manner was really scary. I hadn’t seen that from him before. In July of last year, though, my great aunt passed away from COVID. I’m not going to say I wasn’t taking anything serious but I hadn’t known anyone who passed away. When she passed away that was like 'ok you need to take this even more serious.' Any time it takes something special from you, it changes your mindset."

DCH Vice President of Marketing/Communication Andy North: "I've been through a lot of these in my career, Ebola, Zika virus, they all start similar where we research what’s going on but the big change for me, I remember on a Saturday going out to the [testing] tent we put up and having a final set of meetings on a weekend. I just remember standing there feeling like it was a little surreal. Never in my career had we progressed to that point to do a community screening process but this time we were kind of actively changing the model to address the community. Then just over the last year, every single day I put together the community reports and when we started seeing some of those higher spikes, it was another one of those ah-ha moments."

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If you could go back to March 13, 2020 and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?

Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox: "Stay steady, follow the science and data and one of the things quite frankly, is that masking has proved very successful. I feel like we might could have limited some of the measures that impacted small businesses."

DCH Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robin Wilson: Early on, Paul Betz, our COO, counseled everyone on the COVID team that this would be a marathon and I don’t know if back then I really understood just how much of a marathon it would be. If I had to step back and tell myself anything, 'you need to listen to that, it's going to be a long-term thing."

DCH Vice President Marketing/Communication Andy North: I would say just to follow the process and trust the process as Coach [Nick] Saban would say. Reinforce and support the teams in as meaningful a way as we could. It just is really day-in and day-out encouragement and more direct support and understanding of the team mindset."

Tuscaloosa County Probate Judge Rob Robertson: "It's my belief in looking at it, it was going to be a long event. It was clear as it continued to ramp up what was happening in Europe, it’s coming. Any pandemic is long-tail. Going back, we would know better how we need to operate this way, things we need to shift online as opposed to in person, where to allocate those resources, but hindsight is a lot easier and better to work with. There were a lot of efforts and we were all trying to figure out what mitigation efforts were effective, so I think there was a lot that did well. We couldn’t just close everything but had to figure out how to support the efforts to keep running ... but what a year it's been."

Tuscaloosa News reporter Jason Morton: "I would have pre-ordered the Playstation 5. My son saved his birthday money and got about half and I told him I would get the rest and we were going to make sure he got a PS5 the day of the release about two months after his birthday and we could not do it. It was an entertaining distraction from everything going on but I’ve never tried to do something every day and fail. It was a very defeating endeavor and once it was over it was a big relief. But on a more serious note, I really don't know. Maybe I would tell myself to be a bit more prepared for the loneliness aspect of it, but I don’t know what I could have done to stave that off. If I had been aware [of the loneliness of isolation] maybe it wouldn't have come out of the blue."

WVUA 23 reporter Chelsea Barton: "Brace yourself, you’re about to learn a lot about to get a front row seat to some of the worst days of people's lives. You’re going to see people’s lives torn apart by this virus that a year ago I didn’t even think was a big deal. I was naive, so you need to wise up and take things more seriously and try to be more understanding of people. Not that I wasn’t at the time, none of us had any way of knowing the impact of this. When I look back a year ago, I was just so naive. I feel like some of my friends who were nurses knew a bit more, I didn’t have a clue. Educate yourself and brace yourself because this is something that is not only going to change you professional and emotionally, but mentally as well."

Have a news tip or suggestion on how I can improve Tuscaloosa Patch? Maybe you're interested in having your business become one of the latest sponsors for Tuscaloosa Patch? Email all inquiries to me at ryan.phillips@patch.com.