When the charter jet from Wuhan, China, landed at March Air Reserve Base on Jan. 29, 2020, COVID smacked me right in the nose. I had won the seat of Fifth District Supervisor of Riverside County a little more than a year earlier. This plane hauling over 200 Americans from ground zero of a new deadly virus was landing smack in the middle of my district.

Within hours a huge contingent of international press converged at the county hospital in Moreno Valley.

The CDC had officials out from Atlanta, and they said that they would have a “voluntary” 72-hour quarantine on the incoming families. The county public health officer, Dr. Cameron Kaiser used his authority to impose a 14-day hard quarantine keeping them at the base. This was a courageous act that was the right thing to do at the time.

We knew very little about the virus. Over the next few months, it became obvious that it would eventually infect everyone.

Americans soon found themselves in two camps. Many Democrats felt lockdowns and vaccines were not only helpful in protecting individuals, but also should be mandatory. Many Republicans felt that the danger was overstated and that hastily developed vaccines were unsafe.

In July of 2020, I was able to persuade the county public health department to conduct an antibody study to determine the true mortality of this new virus. I knew that many people experienced no noticeable or very minor symptoms and felt no reason to test for the virus.

The number of confirmed cases was a meaningless statistic because it didn’t represent the true numbers exposed to the virus. As expected, the study showed that the mortality rate was far less than what many government officials were claiming.

Regardless, fear ruled the day and people in every corner of the globe hid in their homes and ordered everything delivered to their doorstep. Jobs that did not have to physically be at their place of business switched to Zoom, while others just didn’t show up. Some small businesses defied the lockdown orders and were punished by local authorities.

Loathing came from both sides and the only science that most people followed was “political” science.

In retrospect, I got some things wrong and some things right. Early on I went on a local news program and stated the virus was no worse than a severe flu. I was wrong, it was far more severe. If you had a family member or a close friend or a colleague succumb to COVID then thinking that this was anything short of the plague is difficult. I was right when I fought to reopen churches for drive-up services and persuaded the county to distribute the first allotments of vaccines based on age. Age was the overwhelming factor in who didn’t survive.

In October of 2020, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya published and released The Great Barrington Declaration. The three scientists were amongst the world’s foremost experts on the subject and laid out a blueprint to protect the most vulnerable while keeping the economy and schools open. I sincerely believe had we followed these recommendations we would have suffered fewer deaths and less economic and educational harm.

However, the biggest lesson I learned from the pandemic was how easily our society can be torn apart by a serious threat that snowballs because we refuse to listen to things that don’t fit into our narrative. This country has far bigger threats that will cause far more misery than the pandemic. If we can’t learn to put this behind us and embrace our neighbors, then there won’t be anyone for the next pandemic to eradicate.

Jeff Hewitt served on the Riverside County Board of Supervisors from 2019-2023.