Two years of COVID in Merced County. What lessons have been learned — and what’s ahead?
.JPG "Registered nurse Julia Mercado administers a COVID-19 vaccine to a patient at a vaccination clinic inside the Cesar E. Chavez Middle School gymnasium in Planada, Calif., on Thursday, March 4, 2021.")
Two years have passed since Merced County reported its first case of COVID-19 — a global pandemic with hyper-local impacts that have largely defined life since early 2020.
As regions throughout California reported their first infections, Merced County was one of the state’s last to have a confirmed case. Businesses and offices closed down while local health professionals, government officials and residents alike held their collective breath waiting for the virus’s inevitable arrival.
“It very rapidly started impacting us in our lives in Merced County, but we were one of the last counties to have a confirmed case,” County Epidemiologist Dr. Kristynn Sullivan said. “There was a lot of fear back then”
The community’s first case was finally reported by the Merced County Department of Public Health on March 22, 2020 — contracted by a resident who had been on spring break in Florida.
That initial infection was confirmed amid a time of heavy restrictions on businesses, limited testing, no available vaccine and mass uncertainty about which measures were most effective in combating the virus.
Two years later, much has changed. The restrictions on businesses have been lifted for quite some time, although mask mandates and capacity caps are enforced at some locations.
Several COVID-19 testing options are readily available, from home kits to testing sites throughout the county. Many residents are protected against the virus by vaccines scientifically proven to be safe and effective. Knowledge around pandemic best-practices has evolved to show the success of social distancing and wearing an adequate mask.
“Looking back, its just mind boggling how far we’ve come and how different things are,” Sullivan said.
Still, the toll on the Merced County community is evident in the 805 known lives lost because of the virus. The emotional toll due to loss, isolation and the general worldwide disruption inflicted by the pandemic is there too, albeit less easy to measure.
Pandemic highs, lows and lessons learned
Getting Merced County vaccinated has been a challenge since the vaccine rollout started in early 2021.
Local public health officials said the process began with a frustrating and demoralizing launch. The county received the second-lowest per-capita vaccine allocation while having the fifth-highest death rate, Sullivan said.
Only healthcare workers and the vulnerable populations were eligible for the vaccine at the time. County health officials said the state favored areas with higher numbers of healthcare professionals, putting Merced County at a disadvantage due to its low number of health providers per capita.
Although vaccines are widely available now, the county never caught up to other parts of the state. Just over 52% of eligible Merced County residents are vaccinated compared to over 74% statewide.
Sullivan said she believes the county had wide interest in vaccination at first, but starting out with too little product caused a window of opportunity to close.
Vaccine hesitancy has played a role locally for a number of other reasons, including misinformation about its safety and historic mistreatment of people of color by the medical community at the national level.
Watching the scientific process play out in real time proved frustrating to many citizens who watched recommendations course-correct as researchers learned more.
“We got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong,” Sullivan said. The pandemic, she hopes, has been an opportunity to improve communication with the public and do better, given the odds of a future public health emergency. “I’m hopeful COVID has been an opportunity to highlight some gaps in our system that we than have an opportunity to fix and address.”
Merced pediatrician Dr. Sima Asadi reiterated Sullivan in voicing the importance of messaging. Asadi has been crucial in working with residents to understand — and ameliorate their fears of — the COVID-19 vaccine.
“To me, people should do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s dictated. I think we’ve learned a lot,” Asadi said.
Asadi and Sullivan each said the pandemic galvanized County Public Health to come together with local medical professionals, city and county leadership, local schools and state-level representatives like never before. That collective dedication has set a new precedent for serving the community, they said.
Fostering community togetherness amid a time of isolation was Merced Mayor Matt Serratto’s mission when he started his first term mid-pandemic in December 2020.
Serratto witnessed firsthand the division the pandemic has created in his community, often deepening political lines.
“I think people are resentful of the pandemic, they’re resentful of the damage it inflicted,” he said. But residents also leveraged those feelings to do right by their community through volunteering, charitable work and helping those in need. “Like any crisis, a lot of people really step up and act heroically.”
Over a year into his term, humility, compromise and striking a balancing act between extremes are the takeaways Serratto has learned while leading a city amid COVID-19.
“When the dust settles from all this and you see the toll this has taken, you see the death toll. On the other side you see the economy, the mental health, the education toll,” he said.
Asadi has advocated for a balanced approach in combating the virus. A vocal proponent for keeping kids in in-person school when safe, Asadi says weighing the social and emotional costs against extreme precautions against COVID-19 is the best way to minimize harm.
“The more you do all that, I think we stand a chance of handling this better and making fewer mistakes,” she said. “I feel like we’re starting to turn a corner.”
To further turn that corner, Asadi said people should refrain from thinking of catching the virus in terms of morality or blame. Contracting COVID-19 too often takes on stigma, she noted.
“You can be a good person and you can follow all the rules and you can do everything right, but it’s a virus,” Asadi said. “We have to understand that the virus does its job. And this virus does its job very well.”
How the future looks
Although the world is still battling surges like winter’s highly contagious omicron variant spike, looking back adds perspective. Two years ago Asadi, like many others, was scared for her life. To protect her mother, she went almost a year without seeing her.
Now, Merced County residents are equipped with the tools to protect themselves while resuming many of the things that brighten life. Asadi, for example, said she will see her mother next week.
Although Sullivan says she’s given up on making predictions about the unpredictable virus’s future, she cautioned against viewing the current lull in cases as indefinite.
“It is easy to think COVID is completely over and in our rear view mirror. And we have thought that before,” she said. “At the end of the day, COVID-19 is a virus and virus’s one and only job is to evolve and infect people. Our feelings on it aren’t going to make COVID go away.”
Although Sullivan isn’t making any predictions, a glance at the county’s case dashboard shows a consistent pattern of summer and winter surges.
Her hope is that those surges will get smaller, more manageable and less severe with the emergence of widespread vaccination and testing — tools that allow residents to live their lives while preventing cases from overwhelming hospitals and losing more community members.
Merced County COVID headlines that gained widespread attention
There were several times during the pandemic where Merced County garnered attention beyond the Central Valley.
In May 2020, Atwater’s City Council defied the state by unanimously voting to become a sanctuary city for all businesses and churches to reopen amid lockdown without fear of repercussion from local law enforcement.
The act of resistance drew criticism and praise from the Atwater community, as well as residents throughout California – some of whom traveled from miles away to witness the city’s defiance.
Later, the state Office of Emergency Services informed Atwater that its Coronavirus Relief Fund dollars would be withheld on account of the city’s noncompliance.
The county again garnered attention later that year when the Foster Farms chicken processing facility in Livingston was shut down. The plant was in the middle of a deadly COVID-19 outbreak that led to the deaths of at least eight workers. Statements made by Foster Farms said it followed CDC guidelines.
That outbreak was identified as one of California’s largest occupational fatalities experienced during the pandemic, Merced County Public Health officials said at the time.
This story was originally published March 20, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
