LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Looking back on the first reports of a coronavirus death in Nevada, it’s striking to see the urgency and interest in a story that people were still struggling to understand.
Now, three years and 11,937 deaths later, the change in attitudes about COVID-19 is remarkable. The magnitude of the events that unfolded around March 17, 2020, have touched the lives of all Nevadans — maybe they lost a loved one, or maybe they are just bitter they ever had to wear a mask.
Our timeline, produced as events were happening in the first months of the pandemic, appears below. There are links in the timeline to previous stories, and videos embedded in the timeline will play if you click on them. It includes some early milestones, and stories that were important as cases added up. Few people understood the magnitude of what was about to happen:
“It seems foreign to me now,” 8 News Now morning anchor John Langeler said Friday after watching the news report on Nevada’s first death. He compared the feeling to his memories from the one-year anniversary of the shutdown. It’s almost unreal to think of all the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip boarded up — employees sent home on Gov. Steve Sisolak’s order.
It was all designed to minimize the impact of a deadly virus that was expected to overwhelm hospitals — and did. But it became so much more than that. We dealt with the unknown as it swept over the world.
And we learned a lot about ourselves and our priorities. For some, it was personal freedom. For others, it was the importance of their children’s socialization. And for many Nevadans, it was about protecting others.