It was just more than a year ago was when Utah’s first COVID-19 patient was diagnosed. Two weeks later, Park City made headlines when the first case of community spread of the virus was reported in the city.
As the first anniversary of COVID-19’s appearance in Utah and the Wasatch Back hits, there has been lots of time for reflection since the strange new virus was reported spreading in China.
With the world having very little understanding of the virus, Summit County made headlines a year ago as it ordered the local ski resorts, restaurants, bars, entertainment venues, and even churches to shut down in an attempt to slow the spread. There was conflicting messaging over wearing a mask.
We built a new lexicon of initialisms – CDC, PPE and PPP among others. And since then, nearly 2,000 people have died from the virus in Utah and more than a half-million have died in the United States.
Appropriate for the very name of COVID-19 – a novel coronavirus – last March we all began charting a new course for how government, schools, business, and our communities would operate.
Dr. Todd Vinto of Intermountain Healthcare remembers the call they got from the Centers for Disease Control last year asking to bring a Utah resident, who had come from Japan on a cruise ship, back to the Intermountain facility in Murray.
“The reality is you do prepare for those things and we had a lot of systems in place but when you get that call .... It's not until that moment that you think, oh wow, this is real,” Vinto said.
Every day, the experts learned something new about the public health emergency – which was a difficult point, he said, to constantly pivot on.
“I think the lesson there is that as we learn things we have to change; we have to adjust,” Vinto said. “People said not to use masks; that probably set us back quite a bit. Now we know that the data is incredible for masks and we need to use masks, and we need to accept that. But you can see when you have these steep learning curves early on, sometimes folks will interpret that as oh, maybe you don't know what you're doing. Well, reality is, we really didn't. And why is that we had a virus that we'd never heard of; never seen until December of 2019, we had to learn very quickly.
Mark Jorgensen was that first patient. He and his wife were on a cruise ship when his wife became ill. His wife was placed in a hospital in Japan to quarantine. He was able to leave once the U.S. State Department could arrange transportation home. He believes he caught the virus on the plane ride home. He was asymptomatic and felt fine the entire time but continued to test positive.
“It was puzzling to me as to why all this fuss was being made about, you know, and I felt totally normal and didn't have anything wrong at all but, but, you know, they were people were learning about it and wondering what this all was and what was going to happen and how contagious it was and all that,” Jorgensen said.
Two weeks later, on Friday, March 13, 2020, Cortney Johanson, the managing partner of The Spur Bar and Grill and 350 Main bars on Park City’s Main Street, got a call from an employee that he had tested positive for the virus. He had been sick and hadn’t worked for the past 10 days. After three trips to the doctor’s office, the employee was finally diagnosed with COVID-19.
Shortly after that call, Johanson received a call from Summit County Health Director Rich Bullough, who said she needed to get people out of the building because it wasn’t safe.
“I didn't think at the time to ask any questions,” Johanson said. “It seemed very serious. And, you know, he didn't want me to tell anybody why we were shutting down because they had a press conference the next day.
“So, he said to just to make up something, so I told my manager that the water was being turned off to the building and that everyone could finish their drink but that was the end of the night. So, I think we got the bar empty around 11 p.m.”
The Health Department required Johanson to get a third-party cleaning crew in the bar before they would let her reopen, even though the one sick employee hadn’t been to work in more than a week.
“But I did spend $7,000 on the hazmat crew so they could bring their news cameras up and show people in hazmat suits cleaning a bar,” she said.
That one confirmed case of community spread has been the only instance where a business was identified as having an employee who had tested positive for the virus. Because The Spur was singled out, Johanson says they’ve had to deal with false rumors. She says her staff was also treated poorly.
“My staff really got beat up about it, you know, and there were people who were kicked out of daycare because their parents worked at The Spur. There are people who couldn't go to their second job, they lost their second jobs, because they worked at The Spur. You know it's not it wasn't just me that went through this, it was my family that is the Spur.
“And it's devastating – it was devastating – and it still hurts.”
Johanson says she tries not to be bitter, yet the sadness remains.
“Obviously by my emotions I'm sad the way it went down,” she said. “You know I'm not bitter I'm just, I'm still heartbroken that we could have been singled out that way. And a year later, you know, I haven't been emotional about this in a year. And I'm emotional about it. It was an awful, awful time and it sucks that we had to take the brunt of it and I'm not sure why. And, you know, that’s why I was hesitant to do this interview in the first place. I’m heartbroken.”
Going from a maximum occupancy of 500 to 175, she says, has been a huge blow to the business. She says they’ve had to adapt and overcome this last year and they are as busy as they can be given the occupancy limits. Still, she’s positive they’ll get through it.
Dr. Vinto uses the analogy that the virus is a marathon, and he says we’re not at the finish line yet.
“We need to keep running the race until we hit the finish line,” he said. “Don't worry about the finish line, it's going to come, but if we don't do the things to continue running, we're not going to hit the finish line, so we have to keep asking, we have to keep minimizing our gatherings and keeping socially distance and maximize the vaccine all the tools in our preventive toolkit.”
