1 Year With Coronavirus In CA: 'A Moment In Time' Becomes An Eon

Editors Note: Patch conducted two separate interviews with Dr. Kimberly Shriner, an infectious disease specialist at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena: once during the state's winter coronavirus surge and again as California crossed the one -year anniversary battling infections.

CALIFORNIA — Dr. Kimberly Shriner recalled the day Huntington Hospital received its first coronavirus patient: It was the end of March 2020. The 36-year-old man spent no more than two days in the Pasadena hospital before he died.

"I remember walking into the ICU and seeing the expression on the nurses' faces and how terrified they looked," she told Patch Wednesday. "He died just a few minutes prior to me walking in there."

Days later, Shriner, an infectious disease specialist, gazed at the San Gabriel Mountains from the hospital as she gathered with her staff at dusk. She recalls looking over Pasadena City Hall as the lights of the city began to flicker on.

"Right now, out there, coronavirus is circulating," Shriner said at the time. She could sense the fear her colleagues felt as soon as she spoke those words.

"But that's what was happening," she says now.

Exactly one year later, Shriner still has her hands full with the coronavirus. Even with the advent of vaccines, the virus still runs amok in California. "I don't think it's really slowed down at all," she said. "It's just changed its tune."

"There Is No Reason To Panic"

Shriner has been in practice for 30 years and is well versed in pandemics. Before the coronavirus, the biggest of her lifetime was the human immunodeficiency virus — better known as HIV — in the 1980s. But she never saw anything like this. No one had.

"There was the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, the first SARS, and we had a little taste in Ebola, which was very scary," Shriner told Patch in a November interview. "But this is a whole different ball game. This is the real deal."

February 2020 dawned on a very different California. Coronavirus had already encircled Wuhan, China, but in the Golden State, people had only begun exchanging memes and nervous speculation. It felt like a far-off reality.

"I had been worried about what was coming," Shriner said. "I was watching what was happening in China. In fact, we had an infection control meeting in February, and I brought it up."

On Feb. 6, Patricia Dowd, a 57-year-old San Jose resident, died after developing flu-like symptoms. Later, tissue samples revealed that she was infected with the novel coronavirus. This was weeks before there were any known cases of the virus in the U.S.

On March 4, it was announced that a Placer County man died of the coronavirus. Back then, officials believed it to be the first coronavirus death in the Golden State.

On that same day, Newsom declared a state of emergency.

"There is no reason to panic," former President Donald Trump told reporters on Feb. 29. "This is something that is being handled professionally."

By March 13, Trump declared a national state of emergency.

On March 19, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered 40 million people in California to shelter in place. At the time, it was considered the most drastic measure by any U.S. governor to confront the virus.

The order was just the first of many in California. It shuttered bars, malls, corporate offices, movie theaters and restaurants — all businesses that weren't deemed essential. Even grocery stores were forced to close early in the opening days of the pandemic after panicked shoppers ransacked toilet paper supplies and stocked up on pretty much everything else.

On the same day, the state confirmed 675 cases and 16 deaths — and with limited testing capabilities. A new coronavirus death had just been confirmed in Los Angeles — "a 30-something who had underlying conditions and lived near Pasadena," The New York Times reported in a story published that day.

"This is not a permanent state. This is a moment in time," Newsom said at the time from California's emergency operations center in Sacramento.

But that moment in time would become a year.

As of Friday, more than 55,700 people have died of coronavirus in the Golden State. And wearied Californians are still regularly using a variety of public health terms — masking, social distancing, PPE, PCR testing, flattening the curve, contact tracing, double masking — that have become household words.

"When we look back now at what we've been through, I think everybody would've been a lot more terrified," Shriner said. "Back then, people thought, 'This is going to pass through.' ... But when that lockdown happened, that just sort of confirmed to me that the government — or at least the local government — had begun to recognize that this was going to be very serious."

In those early days, California's health system, like that in the rest of the country, was unprepared for what would come next, Shriner said. "I think initially all of us thought, 'If we can get on top of this quickly, it may be a seasonal thing,'" Shriner said. "But it became very clear that we weren't equipped."

In 2016, then-President Barack Obama ordered the addition of the Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense to the National Security Council, which was intended to prepare for a potential pandemic. In May 2018, John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, disbanded the group.

By the time the coronavirus hit the West Coast, public health departments had been "winnowed away to nothing," Shriner said.

Within a matter of days, the coronavirus went from a faraway possibility to a total disruption to the fabric of daily life. "We didn't have any public health tools short of just saying, 'Stay at home,'" Shriner said.

"Here It Comes Again"

As the months went on, Shriner and infectious disease experts across the globe learned more about the characteristics of the virus and its behaviors and, later, about the inequities it would expose as the virus disproportionately ripped through the state's most vulnerable ZIP codes.

Meanwhile, Californians adjusted to a new normal: wearing masks, working from home, hosting Zoom happy hours and exchanging lighthearted pleasantries about living in sweatpants.

The beginning saw a dip in cases and the emergence of the now widely felt "COVID-19 fatigue." The state began to open up again, and a lot of Californians grew tired of banal quips about wearing pajamas all day.

In May, protesters marched on the state Capitol lawn to protest Newsom's continuing shelter-in-place order. Huntington Beach fought a court battle with the state to reopen its beaches.

That month, the state loosened restrictions, allowing retail businesses to reopen as the number of cases and deaths ticked downward statewide. By Aug. 28, the state changed the order again, transitioning to a color-coded reopening tier system the state was still under as of this month.

During the summer months, Californians returned to backyard barbecues and other social activities, which led to a rise in hospitalizations and increasing case numbers. “Those that suggest we’re out of the woods, those that suggest this somehow is going to disappear, these numbers tell a very, very different and sobering story,” Newsom said in June.

As cases continued to spike up and down through the summer, signs of a more serious surge came as temperatures dropped in the fall. In November, Newsom issued a limited stay home order, forcing the most affected counties to stop nonessential activities between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. On Dec. 3, Newsom issued a regional stay home order as intensive care unit capacity plummeted and infections spread rapidly across the state.

"Here it comes again," Shriner told Patch in November. She was speaking on behalf of hospital workers when a tidal wave of coronavirus cases threatened the state's hospital system. "The release of the vaccine information is encouraging," Shriner said then. "But it's coming at a time where we just have a tsunami of disease heading toward us."

A winter surge devastated California in December and January, overwhelming hospitals across the state and especially in Los Angeles, which was dubbed the state's virus epicenter. The week of Jan. 5 saw 183 coronavirus deaths a day in L.A. County — about one every eight minutes.

"That is a human disaster, and one that was avoidable," county Supervisor Hilda Solis said at a news conference.

On Jan. 4, the state logged more than 74,000 cases in a single day, the Los Angeles Times reported.

"That was one of the most horrific things I've ever experienced as an infectious disease specialist — certainly that the hospital has ever experienced," Shriner said. "We had the refrigerator [morgue] trucks outside. It was awful," Shriner said. "I hope we don't go down that road again."

In one day during Huntington Hospital's peak, the hospital was treating 209 inpatients and 139 noncoronavirus patients, Shriner said. Another day during the winter surge, the hospital dealt with 14 code blue emergencies.

"The nurses have been beaten up like you wouldn't believe," Shriner said. "And they just do it without complaining. They just press on. But it's exhausting."

Shriner suspected that the toll from California's winter surge has just begun — from coronavirus long-haulers to racial disparities to the post-traumatic stress disorder that nurses and doctors could battle in a post-pandemic world.

"You know, the families that have lost people, the families that lost somebody because somebody brought it home, and they didn't die from COVID but their grandparents did?" she said. "That's a legacy those families have to live with. That's a terrible burden on society."

"The End Of The Beginning"

Shriner, 63, recently received her coronavirus shot along with millions of health workers who also braved California's long and dark winter.

Some 13 million doses of Moderna, Pfizer and the newly approved Johnson & Johnson vaccines have been administered to Californians. Despite hesitancy among some groups, data suggested that the vaccines are working and will be the best route out of a challenging epoch in American history.

On March 14, long-darkened movie theaters lit their marquees for the first time in a year in some of California's hardest-hit counties. Los Angeles was able to exit the state's most restrictive tier for the first time, and most of the state is reopening at a rapid rate.

But 13 million vaccinations in California alone does not signal the end of a dark era, Shriner said. To truly exit the period of the coronavirus, a majority of countries around the world must be vaccinated.

"We have to recruit the whole planet," Shriner said. "Each tiny step forward, I think, we have a chance of getting this thing under better control. But it's going to be a really daunting task."

The next two months in the U.S. will be critical as states race to inoculate their residents against swiftly mutating variants, which only the vaccines can halt, she said. "We're not at the beginning of the end," Shriner said. "But, as [Winston] Churchill would say, 'We are maybe at the end of the beginning.'"

READ MORE: How To Get The Coronavirus Vaccine In California