AUSTIN, Texas — The new year 2020 had just begun when Americans got some alarming news: a Washington state resident fell ill after returning from Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 outbreak began.
The mysterious virus that was half a world away spread rapidly across America so quickly, that just six weeks after that first case was reported in the United States, Austin officials made a surprise announcement.
“I’ve gone ahead and declared a local disaster,” then-Mayor Stave Adler said in a news conference. “I have issued an order that effectively cancels South by Southwest.”
Canceling Austin’s annual gathering of conferences and festivals just weeks before it was to begin was symbolic of a city literally having to shut down.
Pictures on the news of an abandoned and boarded-up downtown entertainment district, of the relatively few cars on the city’s streets, of closed school buildings and crowded hospital emergency rooms told the story more powerfully than words could express.
Dr. Mark Escott was at the center of the city’s response to COVID.
Now five years since cases began showing up in Austin, the city’s chief medical officer spoke to KVUE about his reflections on mandates instructing people to wear masks and get immunized.
“In terms of public policy, mandates are rarely the right answer,” Escott said. “Vaccine mandates are not generally the right answer. Mask mandates are not generally the right answer. The better answer is to have a society that has enough information to make informed decisions and that is also able to balance individual liberty with the needs of the community.”
Escott says the U.S. has learned to live with the COVID virus, and that the lessons from the pandemic have reshaped policies in health care, education and the workplace.