Today marks one year since Indiana reported its first case of COVID-19. It was on the morning of Friday, March 6, 2020 when state officials announced that a Marion County resident who had recently traveled to Boston had tested positive for the coronavirus. A week later, schools began to close, and a couple weeks after that, Indiana was under a stay-at-home order.
Now a year later, more than 665,000 cases have been reported in Indiana. More than 12,000 Hoosiers have died.
“It’s been a year of trials and of heartbreak for so many Hoosiers, but it’s also been a year that has shown us how resilient and how resourceful we can be as a state,” State Health Commissioner Dr. Kris Box said during Wednesday’s COVID-19 press conference.
She noted that Indiana has been able to go from no testing to nearly 300 sites throughout the state, and a vaccine distribution is already well underway. “A year ago, there was no vaccine for COVID-19, and if you’d asked me and Dr. Weaver, we’d would’ve been very pessimistic about sitting here right now doing vaccinations,” Box noted. “Today, we have three vaccines available, and we’ve vaccinated more than one million Hoosiers.”
But Box said we’ve also learned that pandemics can be hard to defeat, and she didn’t have a clear answer as to when it can be considered over. “That’s a really, really difficult question,” Box said. “It’s going to take time. It is going to take time to get everybody vaccinated, and we’re not going to be able to call this pandemic over with mutations and the other things that are happening with this virus until we’ve really protected more of our population and really decreased our cases and kept those cases down.”
Governor Holcomb added that it may be less of a question of being done with the virus and more of a question of managing it. “The virus – when is it going to end? We’ve got the flu every year. People get vaccinated every year, so I think that’s an impossible question to answer because we just don’t know,” Holcomb said. “But what we do know is we have more control now than ever, and it’s paying off in part. When you look at the previous surges, we didn’t have a vaccination to bring down those hospitalization rates and those deaths. Now we do.”
Box said she looks specifically at each county’s number of cases per 100,000 residents, as well as the how good a handle the state has on the coronavirus variants.
