Westneat: Who won the pandemic? In our state it’s not even close

I’ll get back to that last part in a minute. It speaks to whether society intends to gain any wisdom from the pandemic years or just try to forget what a debacle it was.

So how’d the San Juans do it? For starters, they are islands, which James says gave them a built-in virus management advantage. It’s also a relatively homogenous population.

But the story of what happened there isn’t just geographic luck. The county with the highest death rate in Washington state, Ferry County, has less than half the people of the San Juans, and is more remote. The reality is the novel virus eventually infiltrated every corner of every state.

It turns out James, the health director, also teaches public health at the University of Washington. One of his courses there happens to cover past pandemics.

“When the coronavirus started to hit back in 2020, I thought ‘Oh, let’s see if we can borrow from history,’ ” he says.

Long story shortened: The San Juans imposed the first mask mandate in the state, and possibly the first one in the nation. When the sheriff told James he couldn’t enforce it due to lack of manpower, James turned to the businesses to impose it instead.

“It was a huge ask of the businesses, and very contentious at first,” he says. “But they are pillars in this community. When they came around to it, it was like we had deputized all these respected people to help us. So wearing masks really caught on here, right in March 2020, earlier than anywhere else.”

At the same time, James suggests they were careful not to push too far. Some residents wanted a quarantine — to close the ferries, shutting the islands off from society. The county decided that would be crippling for the fragile island economy, so they kept the ferries running.

Bottom line: By the time of the San Juans’ first death, in January 2022, the state had already suffered 11,000 deaths, the nation more than 875,000. The islands’ grand total of two deaths, one in January and one in March of this year, were among unvaccinated residents, the health department says.

Businesses in the islands suffered mightily at times, as did schools and other institutions. It wasn’t a cost-free strategy, James said. Health workers there did get some death threats and protests, too, though it was muted.

“I think for all the hardship, people came to feel they were living in a refuge, both from COVID and from the ideological insanity of what was going on around the country,” James says. “The community wasn’t as fractured as it was in many other places.

“The whole story of the pandemic in the United States is how terribly we did with it. Was the suffering and death preventable? Not all of it, no. But most of it was. Look at San Juan County.”

Will people look? Most of what’s cited above is anecdotal — the cause-and-effect hasn’t been formally studied. But I haven’t seen much interest in after-action reports. America, satisfied with itself against all odds, is moving on.

Congrats are due to the San Juans, though. It was a hollow cliché to say that we were all in it together. They really kind of were.

There are no winners of a pandemic, of course. Only losers, and survivors. But the San Juans showed others a little how to come through one for next time, if they wish to see.