This story originally appeared on TheIntersectionReports.org on March 35, 2025.
Just four years ago, COVID-19 had taken a place among the leading causes of death in the San Joaquin Valley, right along with heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and strokes. In 2021, in the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, the disease claimed nearly 6,400 lives across the eight-county region.
The virus, which first emerged in China in 2019, circulated worldwide in 2020, and the first confirmed cases in the San Joaquin Valley surfaced in March 2020. The rapid spread of the virus in California and the U.S. touched off a two-year frenzy of public health measures, including various stages of business and school closures, mandates to wear masks in public and social-distancing restrictions intended to slow its circulation in the population before the first vaccines were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in late 2020…