This is a special joint broadcast with KNPR's State of Nevada and Vegas PBS' Nevada Week. Watch the recorded live stream of the broadcast below .
It was March 12, 2020, when Governor Steve Sisolak announced a state of emergency in Nevada in response to the growing infections and deaths from COVID-19.
Five days later, he announced a statewide business shutdown. And something no one ever thought would happen happened: The Las Vegas Strip shut down for 78 days.
That led to changes that, for some, changed their lives and outlooks forever.
Nevada school kids transitioned to distance learning for nearly a year. Mental health came out of the shadows as people openly admitted the isolation was hurting their psychology. Businesses closed and some never re-opened.
Five years later Nevadans are still feeling the effects of the pandemic in our state.
And there were the many who passed away.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 12,000 Nevadans died from the virus, while 900,000 became infected.
In collaboration with VegasPBS and Nevada Week host Amber Renee Dixon, State of Nevada looked back on five years after the pandemic began. Aside from streaming it here, you can also watch it on YouTube at VegasPBS.
These are some of the points made by guests and listeners who phoned or called the show.
Brian Labus, UNLV epidemiologist who was also on the Governor’s Covid Task Force:
We're still seeing the virus circulate. It hasn't gone away, but we're experiencing it very differently than we did five years ago, because it's not a new virus anymore. People have immunity, both from getting infected naturally and from the vaccine, and so that really changes the way that we interact with the virus. Because of that immunity, the death rates that we see are lower. We understand more about treatment. We understand more about prevention. So it's the same virus, but the way we interact with it is different these days, and we have a better understanding of how to protect ourselves, but people are still getting sick with COVID, and people are still dying from COVID.
Dan Ficalora, Bridge Counseling Services clinical director:
The unimaginable grief and trauma that came from this experience on the individual level, but also as a society and as a culture, that collective trauma that we all experience? You know, watching the death toll count on the evening news every night kind of tick up slowly. If we were going to create a lab experiment to figure out a way to increase anxiety and depression in a population, you would probably go with isolation and uncertainty and just turn up the volume on both of those. And that's exactly what happened during the pandemic. No one knew what was happening, and we were all isolated from each other, and that's the perfect recipe to increase substance abuse, depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide. All of them went up during the pandemic.
Megan Rauch Griffard, UNLV professor of educational policy:
So for the kids, especially the kids in our state, going to school is an inherently social and developmentally important experience, and what we saw during the pandemic … those opportunities were lost. And when you have a young mind and a developing brain, it's super important to be able to interact with peers, to interact positively with adults, which is something that happens at school every day for kids. And so not having those things and also dealing with the stress of living through a pandemic is really scary and really hard, and when you don't necessarily have quite yet the developmental tools to process what you went through, we can see that manifest in schools today with certain behaviors that kids are displaying, or with chronic absenteeism, so students either being not feeling comfortable coming to school or not feeling like school is a priority for them anymore. And so there's just a lot going on for young people today, five years later.
Andrew Woods, UNLV director of the Center for Business and Economic Research
When we go back and think about, you know, those early days in March of 2020, at first we thought it might be a few days, a few weeks, and then it turned into months. And we saw that just here in Nevada, our unemployment rate skyrocketed up to 29 percent. (But just in Southern Nevada) , it was 34% so one in three workers was unemployed. The Las Vegas Strip was shut down, right? We had no visitors coming through the airport or driving in from Southern California, and our economy came pretty close to a screeching halt, which is, as an economist, something terrifying to see.
Fortunately, since then, we've rebounded much faster than I think we anticipated, but we still see the scars in the economy. Since then, you know, the fastest growing industries we've seen since the pandemic in terms of employment have been transportation, warehousing, healthcare as well as construction. For leisure and hospitality, they only regained their full employment levels from 2019 just early last year. Now, what's interesting about socially leisure and hospitality is that food and accommodation type jobs, so those are starting in kitchens or running hotels, they actually decreased. And we've seen also a burst of entrepreneurial type activity since the pandemic.
Listener from Mesquite
I'm a COVID widow. My husband David, Michael Farley passed away from COVID on November 10, 2020. He was in the hospital for two weeks in Mesquite, and the other 40 days he was in the hospital in Las Vegas. And you never, ever really get over the suffering that you know they went through … and not being able to hold their hand or talk to them, and just hoping that they can text because they can barely breathe. So I don't believe everybody really realizes just what damage it did to a lot of families and how we still will grieve for the rest of our lives. Not for ourselves, but for those who suffered so horribly, and all we can do is try to continue on with our life, but we'll never forget.
And my husband got the COVID at the same time President Trump did, and it broke my heart when the President said that he beat COVID and it's not a big deal, and he threw his mask off. And I cried. I cried like a baby, because it was a big deal to a lot of us, and this is our life from now on, is to always remember that COVID was real and it pretty well destroyed a lot of lives.
Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick, District B
Well, first of all, I would tell you, it's probably the hardest thing that I've had to go through in my entire life, and I've been through some things so but really it was pretty hard in the beginning, especially because we didn't know a lot of information, and we were getting mandates all the time to shut down, to use masks, not use masks, and there was a lot of uncertainty for folks. There was a lot of uncertainty for our first responders who were expected to be on the front lines many of our public health. Agencies that stepped up.
But I can tell you, over time, we have really a lot to be proud of. We did a lot of great things during that time frame, but, but it was not easy, and I heard earlier that, you know, there were death threats, there were protests at people's homes. … And you know, there was one moment when I had a four-hour protest at my house with strobe lights and cameras. My grandkids were scared to death about why they were so angry with us. But at the end of the day, we had a job and a responsibility to ensure that the majority of the people had the resources that they needed to navigate and to move forward.
Guests: Brian Labus, epidemiologist, UNLV; Megan Rauch Griffard, professor of educational policy, UNLV; Andrew Woods, director, Center for Business and Economic Research, UNLV; Dan Ficalora, clinical director, Bridge Counseling Services
