Lynn Johnson for NPR
It didn’t take long for the pandemic to arrive on Whidbey Island. That pastoral slice of the Pacific Northwest meanders through the upper reaches of Puget Sound, coming within just 30 miles of downtown Seattle. It was this corner of the country that alerted Americans to the reality that a virus doesn’t abide by international borders and a global pandemic had made landfall in the U.S.
The very first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was here, in Washington state. And by early March of 2020, the virus had torn through a nursing home in a quiet suburb on the eastern edges of Lake Washington. That outbreak marked some of the very first known U.S. deaths of the pandemic. As ambulances shuttled those patients to a nearby hospital, the rest of the country was left to wonder: When would those scenes of panic and disease reach their hometowns, their hospitals, their parents, siblings and spouses?
Not long after, the virus had caught a ride to Whidbey Island, home to about 70,000 residents. And there, too, the daily rhythms of life changed almost instantly. The place enjoys a strange kind of isolation. It runs 55 miles north to south and is counted among the longest islands in the U.S. On the map, Whidbey could almost pass as a peculiar peninsula, suspended in the jumble of waterways and small islands that dot the region.
In reality, though, it is severed from the mainland. A strait, known as Deception Pass, runs between Whidbey and neighboring Fidalgo Island, which nearly touches the eastern shores of the Sound. Other than by air, there are only two ways on and off: by taking a short ferry ride; or braving a two-lane, steel bridge that soars 180 feet above the water before depositing travelers in a forest nearly two hours north of Seattle.
The story of the coronavirus pandemic is often told in extremes. An avalanche of patients overwhelming a hospital in New York. Refrigerated trucks serving as makeshift morgues in Texas. Bodies stacked to the ceiling at funeral homes in…
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