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MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Do you remember what you were doing in March of 2020? It was this time two years ago when the world began to shut down, bracing for the unknown of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Life began changing,” said Sonia Balerio of North Miami-Dade County.
A doctor CBS4 spoke with Monday said when COVID-19 first began it felt like they were flying a plane as they were building it. Everything was happening at once and no one was really sure what was going on.
“Honestly, I thought it was the end of everything. I thought it was going to be like a zombie apocalypse,” said Barbara Gimenez of Miami.
The coronavirus spread across the country, infecting thousands.
“We didn’t know exactly what was going on. It came as a surprise. Something from another planet,” recalled Jorge Jorge of Kendall.
People remember when restaurants closed and beaches shut down.
“You wake up you go to the beach or Walmart – no mask. Then the next day, even if you couldn’t afford a mask, you still needed to go find a mask,” said Gimenez.
In two years’ time, COVID-19 killed more than 6 million people worldwide.
Since the start of the pandemic, more than 73,000 people have died in Florida.
“That’s 6 million less people than we have on the Earth, you know, back in 2020, before the whole virus started, just because of the virus,” said Jackson Memorial Hospital Chief Medical Officer Hany Atallah.
Now, as the world hits the two-year mark, Jackson Health System is treating just 54 COVID-19 patients. But almost exactly two months ago, at the peak of Omicron, 564 people were being treated. At Memorial Regional Hospital, numbers peaked at the same times during Delta and Omicron surges.
“The volumes at our emergency departments dropped, plummeted, very, very quickly,” said Atallah.
Many people skipped the emergency room, scared of contracting COVID-19 at the hospital.
“We had people coming in with problems that lingered, depending on how acute the problem was, whether it’s lingered for a matter of hours and they should have come hours earlier, or if it’s lingered for days or weeks even,” said Atallah.
But, he said, people are now more comfortable, adjusting to their version of a new normal.
“We’ve heard before this may be the beginning of the end, but we’ll have to wait and see. We haven’t really been successful in predicting it in the past,” he said.
People CBS4 talked to say at this point, if COVID should surge again, they have certain protocols they’ll revert back to, like masks and social distancing.