GRAND FORKS – In early 2020, an invisible enemy invaded, igniting widespread fear, upending day-to-day living, disrupting education and stifling business activity.
The novel coronavirus – better known as COVID-19 – was unleashed on the world, forcing changes in lifestyle, such as self-imposed isolation, and introducing the terms “social distancing” and “contract tracing” into the common vernacular.
Public health professionals, as frontline warriors in the battle with a mysterious and unprecedented rival, were especially concerned.
Five years after an official state of emergency was declared, this is the first in a series of Herald articles exploring the massive impact of a virus that shook society and ushered in untold suffering and grief.
“This was a brand new event,” recalled Michael Brown, who was mayor of Grand Forks at the time. He likened it to the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, which claimed an estimated 50 million lives worldwide.
“And we were in denial.”
Around the world, more than 70 million have died as a result of COVID-19, according to estimates.
And “it killed people. It killed people you cared about,” Brown said. “… A lot of unnecessary deaths.”
Looking back, Debbie Swanson, former director of Grand Forks Public Health, said she became aware of “this strange respiratory illness that was occurring in China” during a state health department webinar session in December 2019.
“I think at that time, we all thought it would be like the original SARS or MERS, or whatever of those other diseases that were quickly contained.”
Not long after, though, as the first cases were identified in the U.S., Swanson and her colleagues began to grasp the “concerns about the infectiousness of the disease,” she said.
In mid-March 2020, the first COVID-19 cases were diagnosed in North Dakota and Minnesota. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum declared a state of emergency and schools were closed. UND hockey games and state high school basketball tournaments were canceled.
“It was like, this has never happened before,” Swanson said. “It was kind of a really sentinel moment for me. … That was a really big event.”
Her initial focus – among many responsibilities – was to identify cases of respiratory illness and it took time to get test results; some had to be isolated until results were known, she said. Among them were people living at Grand Forks’ Northlands Rescue Mission and the unhoused, and others who needed to be placed in alternative housing.
Finding safe housing “was a lot of work,” Swanson said, “but we felt that it was really crucial to preventing the spread (of COVID) in the community.”
Looking back, given these and other immediate demands related to preserving and protecting public health, she recalls thinking, “we’re in for a long haul, but I don’t think I thought it would be as long as it was.
“But I knew that there would be a period of time where we would have to be containing the virus as best we could, and I knew that Public Health would be on the front lines of that.”
In the years that followed, the COVID-19 pandemic went on to wreak havoc – touching everyone, most likely, in some way.
In 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 ranked as the third-leading cause of death in North Dakota and in Grand Forks County, according to records kept by North Dakota Vital Statistics. In 2020, it ranked behind heart disease and cerebrovascular disease, and in 2021, behind heart disease and cancer. (Cerebrovascular disease refers to conditions that affect the blood vessels in the brain and spinal cord.)
In North Dakota, the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed March 11, 2020, in Ward County, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services.
In Grand Forks County, the first cases – two people in their 30s – were reported March 29, 2020.
It wasn’t long before it became fatal in North Dakota. The first COVID deaths began occurring that March, while in Grand Forks County, deaths were first reported in May.
In 2020, in Grand Forks County, 64 deaths were attributed to COVID-19, according to North Dakota Vital Statistics. The following year, that count fell by nearly half, to 34. It dropped to 23 in 2022, five in 2023 and seven in 2024.
In 2020, in North Dakota, 1,165 people lost their lives due to COVID-19. That figure continued to drop substantially each year; in 2024, it fell to 61, according to preliminary data.
In Grand Forks County in December 2024, 148 reported cases of COVID and no deaths due to COVID were reported.
Eric Hylden/Obituary
In Minnesota, the first case of COVID-19 occurred in Ramsey County and was announced March 6, 2020, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. The first case in the northwest region of the state occurred in a Beltrami County resident on March 14, 2020.
In Polk County, which borders North Dakota across the Red River from Grand Forks, the first report of a COVID-19 case was reported in March 2020. The next month there were 42 cases. The highest number of cases, 1,938, was recorded in January 2022, surpassing the next highest, 1,601, which occurred in November 2020.
There were 88 cases in the most recent January.
Polk County’s first deaths attributed to COVID-19 occurred in May 2020. The highest number of deaths occurred in November 2020, at 23, and December 2020, at 27. In each of the remaining months in that time frame, 10 or fewer deaths have occurred; no deaths were recorded in 21 of them – including nine months in 2024.
Throughout Minnesota, from 2020 to 2024, nearly 1.96 million COVID cases have been reported. In that time frame, the number of deaths dwindled from 5,926 in 2020 to 922 in 2024. The five-year total is 16,493.
The decrease in deaths can be attributed to the success of COVID-19 vaccinations, improved understanding of how best to treat COVID-19, and more robust immunity in the general population as people received multiple vaccinations and survived COVID-19 infections which improves their immune systems’ ability to recognize and fight new COVID-19 infections, according the state health department.
In the early stages of the pandemic, “we didn’t know a lot of details about how (COVID-19) was spread, how very airborne it was …” Swanson said, but in the past GFPH “had done a lot of preparation and planning for pandemic flu, and that was a very big part of our emergency preparedness work for years prior to COVID.
“Some of that work was very useful, but things did unfold differently than some of our planning.”
Marcus Lee has been regional emergency preparedness and response coordinator at GFPH for about 11 years.
“COVID was like no other,” Lee said. Before the pandemic hit, a plan was in place for public health emergency preparedness, “but we didn’t know what kind of a different idea COVID was going to be. … (The department’s plan) wasn’t completely new, but it was something that we made adjustments to on the fly.”
In tandem with the state health department, he marshaled the resources and personnel to run COVID-19 testing at LM Windpower and UND’s Fritz Pollard Athletic Center. He credits the state health department and the North Dakota National Guard with providing much-needed personnel, mostly nurses, to conduct the tests and Altru Health System for running them.
The partnerships that Grand Forks Public Health built with institutional partners were “tremendously important for our capacity to respond,” Lee said.
When COVID emerged, Steve Gander remembered “a sense (of) I feel like we’re living right now in history. … (And) right away, trying to get your head around it, from almost an epidemiologic standpoint, what is this thing that we’re going to be dealing with?”
Gander, who was mayor of East Grand Forks at the time and now represents District 1B in the Legislature, recalled a meeting with local business owners who told “absolute gut-wrenching stories” about how personal reserves had been decimated. The decision to commit $260,000 – supported by the City Council and city staff and every resident he talked to – was made to support small- to mid-size businesses to keep them viable, because he and Mark Olstad, city council member, realized that federal and state funds were not going to be quick enough, or sufficient enough, to save local businesses.
“I really feel that, as a community, we pulled together,” Gander said.
He also highlighted the role of K-12 teachers.
“If there’s an educator out there who in any way wonders, do I make any difference at all in this world, I’d say take a look at the pandemonium that took place when these kids were not in the classroom,” he said. “I would say, what you do makes all the difference. … The environment that these teachers create inside of that classroom, it’s not just academic, but it’s a place for kids to gather and socialize and develop these skills and partner with other kids. …”
Gander also praised East Grand Forks first-responders, firefighters and police, he said.
The most important lesson gleaned from the pandemic, Gander said, is “we need each other. We don’t do well in isolation. The brain kind of implodes, it goes spiraling downward. I don’t care if you’re five months old or 100 years old, we need human contact … that human bond.”
In Grand Forks, in the early months of the pandemic, “there was a lot of push back” on masking and isolating, said former Mayor Brown. But, at City Hall, “we made the right decisions with people staying home and wearing masks. It’s better to err on the side of caution. I think people’s lives are more important than the banter back and forth.”
These days, people are “getting complacent, and there’s a cost to that,” Brown said. Too many people are not doing many of the “minor things,” like hand-washing, that have been shown to be protective.
“It’s a real issue; people get sick and have to be isolated. In the elderly community, it’s very threatening and very serious,” said Brown, who serves on the board of Valley Senior Living.
He reflected on the loss of life during the pandemic.
“It is sad when you look back, the people we lost,” he said. “It makes you sad to think that could have been prevented if people were careful.”
Shawn McBride, public health epidemiologist with Grand Forks Public Health, also noted that the elderly are vulnerable, as well as others “who don’t even know they’re at increased risk,” such as cancer patients who are taking immune system-suppressing drugs.
He acknowledges that some trust in the public health community may have been eroded, because, in part, as the landscape changed and new information was discovered about COVID-19, guidelines shifted.
“I think people are navigating a very complex and difficult information environment, where it is difficult for people to determine what the true risks are of disease, what the real prevention measures are, and how effective prevention measures are,” McBride said.
“… I think it really is based upon being able to find credible accurate information and trust the sources of that information. Because there is so much misinformation out there and it has made it very difficult for people to understand exactly what risks COVID-19 or other communicable diseases pose and what things they can do to protect themselves. I think that’s the really big challenge that we have,” he said.
As the former director of GFPH, Swanson credits the success of the COVID response to her staff and collaboration with other organizations, such as Altru Health System and UND, as well as an effective vaccination campaign.
“We really had a community that really embraced vaccination,” she said.
Recalling the impact of the pandemic, Swanson said she feels fortunate she did not lose any relatives or close family members to COVID, “but I really feel for the people, especially, who lost loved ones and lost them early in the pandemic, when they weren’t able to be with them, they weren’t able to visit them; (victims) got acutely ill. And I feel for the health care workers that had to witness so much suffering.
“When I look back on it,” Swanson said, “the loss of life is really stunning, it’s hard to think about. And I feel for all the people who have lost loved ones during that time frame. And I don’t think we reflect on that enough, as a nation, as we should.”