Sara Cody

On Jan. 23, 2020, three days after the first confirmed case of the coronavirus in the U.S., Cody led the Santa Clara County Public Health Department to establish an incident command center. In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, Cody and her team were responsible for contact tracing. This involved interviewing every infected person, tracing back every place they had been and everyone they had contact with, and monitoring them in quarantine in an effort to stop the chain of transmission.[7] On March 3, after the rate of transmissions had become nearly impossible to contact trace, she began to issue guidelines, recommending the closure and cancelation of public gatherings. On March 9, this recommendation was extended to include sporting events, festivals, bars and clubs.[7] On March 15, after comparing the trend lines of COVID-19 cases in the Bay Area with Italy's a week and a half earlier, Cody decided drastic action needed to be taken. In a conference call that day to adjacent county health advisors, Cody was credited for driving the urgency of action that focused on "extreme social distancing."[8] On March 16, 2020, Bay Area medical officers, led by Cody, established a historic seven-county legal order that required residents to "shelter-in-place." This order was the first of its kind in the mainland United States, after Puerto Rico's lockdown on March 12; it came three days ahead of California governor Gavin Newsom’s similar mandate for the entire state. Cody explained that "If you are going to do something really drastic like shelter-in-place, you want to do it as early as you possibly can. Because if you wait to do it, you get all the harms, all of the social and economic disruptions, but you miss a lot of the benefit."[9]

Cody and the other Bay Area health officers’ prompt actions have been widely praised. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC said they "acted faster and more decisively than anyone else in the country and as a result they did successfully, as they say, flatten the curve and hospitals in the Bay Area did remain intact and not get overrun."[11] The proactive step of establishing an incident command center eight days before the county's first confirmed case is noted by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the first of many examples of public officials in Silicon Valley demonstrating forward-thinking leadership driven by data and science...Dr. Cody’s bold action when every hour counted protected the Bay Area from the overflowing hospitals and mobile morgues we see in some cities around the world."[12] Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates that if New York City acted in the same way a week sooner than it did, it could have reduced its death toll by up to 80%. Since then, the number of national cases and deaths have grown more than 10 times faster than Santa Clara County figures.[12] The state of California issued its own statewide stay-home order four days later. Partly due to this delay, California saw its cases grow more than four times faster than the county's own cases.[12]

Cody has made regular appearances on Bay Area press and video conferences, explaining county health policy and reminding residents that the COVID-19 battle is a long-term health concern: "Because we flattened the curve, it doesn’t mean that we are done. Because we are far, far, far from done."[13] In a press conference in April, Cody confirmed that the first United States COVID-19 death had actually occurred in the Bay Area on February 6, some 23 days prior to the previously known first death. This was the first of 3 early COVID-19 deaths, which Cody described as "iceberg tips", suggesting that there was a vast and unseen propagation.[14] Following one news conference, she became the subject of a viral meme, after she implored citizens to refrain from touching their faces, then licked her finger to turn a page.[7]