enterprise THE DAVIS
FRIDAY, JANUARY 1, 2021
The year 2020: Calamity and chaos of COVID ■ Editor’s note: This is the first in a 2-part series looking at the ups and downs of the coronavirus pandemic through 2020.
BY ANNE TERNUS-BELLAMY Enterprise staff writer Back in late January and early February, as the world increasingly focused attention on a novel coronavirus impacting primarily China but cropping up elsewhere around the globe, life continued more or less as normal in Davis. Students were attending classes and going about their lives at UC Davis; parents were dropping their children off at schools around town and heading off to work; sports fields and bars and restaurants were bustling with activity and candidates for public office were preparing for an early primary in March. The main message coming from county health officials at the time was encapsulated in a Davis Enterprise headline on Feb. 5: “Flu is bigger threat to residents than coronavirus.” “Flu remains the highest risk for respiratory illness in our community,” Yolo County’s deputy health officer said while urging everyone to get their flu shots. And while the emerging coronavirus “is a serious public health concern,” the state Department of Public Health reported at the time, “there is no evidence of sustained person-toperson transmission of the virus in California or elsewhere in the country.” But word came less than two weeks later that an individual who did, in fact, become infected by community spread was being treated at a hospital in Northern California. The Enterprise reported on Feb. 26 that the UC Davis Medical Center was treating that coronavirus patient, a resident of Solano County who had no known exposure to the virus through travel or close contact with a known infected individual. A little over a week later, on March 6, Yolo County reported its first case of the coronavirus. Davis resident Marilyn Stebbins, a healthy, fit 58-year-old, would spend eight days in intensive care battling the virus and later tell her story of recovery. Dr. Ron Chapman, the county health officer at the time, said, “at this point, we do not know how it was picked up in the community.” However, he said, “there is growing evidence that coronavirus is already in our community and is spreading widely.”
SEE COVID, PAGE A5
VOL. 124 NO. 1
Black Lives Matter protesters march down Fifth Street in Davis in June. OWEN YANCHER/ ENTERPRISE PHOTO
Enterprise staff picks its top stories Enterprise staff It was a year that dragged us away from our comfortable assumptions and into a dystopian nightmare we could scarcely credit in the 21st century. Twenty-Twenty was the year of SARS-CoV-2, COVID19, coronavirus ... the consensus pick among Enterprise staff for the most important story of the year.
No. 1: Coronavirus In fact, the only question is how many spots the various effects of this multifaceted crisis would take up on our annual
Top 10 list. Davis, Yolo County and the world were faced with disruptions all across society, from the economy to education and even basic social interaction. There was no part of life left untouched by this plague. Along with the rest of the world, Yolo County residents watched as our neighbors died, businesses shut their doors, schools closed and all normal movement came to a halt. Yolo County finished the year with 8,097 cases and 109 deaths. Of those, 1,172 and 12, respectively, were from Davis. With UC Davis mostly shut down, and the students gone, the city’s businesses suffered massive
financial losses, exacerbated by the state and local health departments’ restrictions on all sorts of activities to try and keep the spread under control. The virus hit Northern California early, as Anne TernusBellamy first reported in February that the UCD Medical Center was treating the first person in the country to have contracted the novel coronavirus from community exposure. From then on, it was an everspiraling litany of bad news, as small successes in holding back the tide were overwhelmed by more and more positive tests. The local cases started rolling in in March, with the first death coming toward the end of the month. The city and county responded with shelter-in-place
No. 2: UCD’s response On campus, UC Davis canceled in-person finals at the end of winter quarter, then announced that spring quarter classes would be online only. On March 20, all non-essential operations were shut down, effectively turning the sprawling campus into a ghost town.
SEE 2020, PAGE A4
School district awarded $9M for tech-ed courses BY JEFF HUDSON Enterprise staff writer The Davis school district is readying upgrades to many of the school district’s CTE (Career Technical Education) programs — a category that includes courses in subjects ranging from agriculture to robotics, auto shop to computer science, and more. That’s because the Davis school district was awarded some $9 million in grant money last fall, coming from a variety of grants that the district decided to pursue. “These are very competitive grants,” said Associate Superintendent Rody Boonchouy, adding that school districts up and down the state were “scrambling to access these
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(financial) resources.” Boonchouy admitted that he was very pleasantly surprised when a number of the school district’s applications for CTE grants were funded, given that so many school districts were applying to get more CTE funding. Davis High School will be getting grants to support the robotics program, the agriculture program and the auto shop program. Da Vinci Charter Academy will be getting grant money as well to help build a long-planned “technology hub” on Da Vinci’s portion of the Valley Oak campus (which was originally built in the 1950s under the name East Davis Elementary, long before high school students were toting around laptop computers all day long).
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The construction plans for several of these projects are either work-in-progress, or finished documents that are being reviewed by the Division of the State Architect in Sacramento (which has to approve plans for construction and/or modernization at California’s public schools). “We are on a timetable, and we have to move quickly” and put the grant money to work as it reaches the district, Boonchouy said. Boonchouy has been working on updating and upgrading the school district’s CTE programs since fall 2018, when the district launched a program review of CTE that involved many meetings over roughly a
SEE CTE, PAGE A2
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