San Diego County's COVID-19
emergency is officially over.
It ended today,
along with California State of emergency,
the proclamations that gave state and
local leaders the legal authority to make,
amend and rescind regulations.
They could also redirect funds.
The Emergency declaration had been
in place for nearly three years,
and tonight CBS 8 Steve Price
takes a look back at the
PANDEMIC'S impact on our county.
San Diego's very first COVID
case was an American evacuated
from China who was under federal
quarantine here at MCCS Miramar.
That was February 12th, 2020.
Just two days after that,
the county declared a local health emergency,
and not long after that,
things quickly went from bad to worse.
Local public health leaders knew
it was only a matter of time,
and on March 9th, 2020,
this San Diego County resident
is hospitalized and doing well.
It officially happened,
COVID confirmed in our community.
And in those next few days, panic
spread even faster than the virus.
There's a line just to get in.
We've I've never seen that happen before.
There's no bread. No, I mean nothing.
Everybody's going insane.
Toilet paper sold out,
along with hand sanitizer and food.
Store shelves empty.
The panic is real.
Definitely San Diegans walking around
with masks to try to slow the spread.
But it didn't work. On March 19th,
a stay at home Order was issued,
shutting down almost everything
not considered essential.
Beaches, boardwalks, and parks were closed.
This includes the water. Schools
closed, two kids suddenly trying
to figure out how to learn online,
and it wasn't going well.
You've got a generation of children that
are just being scarred by this experience.
Frustrated parents and students took to
the streets, demanding schools reopen
multiple times. My kids
have been upset. Depressed
in May 2020, some restrictions were lifted,
but a video posted to social
media showed a bar in PB packed,
and county leaders were furious.
We simply cannot tolerate such
blatant and intentional violations
of the public health order. In June,
San Diego County passed 10,000 cases,
and in July, with numbers spiking,
bars, indoor dining and many small
businesses were forced to shut down again,
shutting us down all over again.
How am I going to keep my salon?
Like my dream business,
you know, it was a rough summer,
but in September schools were
allowed to reopen.
Then in November, we hit a tragic milestone,
passing 1000 COVID related
deaths in the county.
In December, a nurse became
San Diego's first civilian to
receive a COVID-19 vaccine,
but the rollout was slow and for many,
too late. More than 155,000
San Diegans tested positive,
and 1500 died in December and January.
It's been hard.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it.
It's been hard for me.
It's been hard for my staff.
It's been hard for the doctors and
the nurses and the pharmacists
and everybody in the hospital.
The county then came up with a new plan
to get shots out quickly to the community,
opening vaccination superstations like
this one at Petco Park, capable of
vaccinating thousands of people daily.
January 2021 also had another first
two gorillas at the San Diego Zoo
tested positive for coronavirus.
It was the first confirmed human to ape.
Transmission.
They're doing OK. They're they're
experiencing some mild symptoms,
and we continue to observe them.
But they're drinking, they're eating,
and they're interacting with one another. In
March, we passed more than
a million vaccines given,
and in June, California's leaders
lifted most restrictions.
The timing wasn't great.
A few weeks later,
we got hit hard with the Delta variant,
which turned out to be much
more contagious than the
original strain of the virus.
And in December 2021,
Omicron arrived in 2020.
Do we wrote a roller coaster of outbreaks,
and in 2023 we're still experiencing
around 2 to 300 new cases a day.
If this continues,
our county will hit 1,000,000
confirmed cases sometime this summer.
Steve Price, CBS a.