Dr. Raynard Washington called the pandemic death toll “heartbreaking.”
MECKLENBURG COUNTY, N.C. — Five years after the first COVID-19 case was detected in Mecklenburg County, the county’s health director says the pandemic response was appropriate despite controversial measures like lockdowns and mask mandates.
About 2,000 Mecklenburg County residents have died from COVID-19 since the virus first appeared in March 2020.
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Dr. Raynard Washington, who began as the county’s deputy health director when the pandemic hit, described the early days of the response as overwhelming.
“It was kind of like being deployed to a military mission,” Washington said. “We worked around the clock, with a lot of uncertainty and a lot of anxiety.”
Washington quickly rose to lead a department of nearly 1,000 people tasked with managing Charlotte’s response to the then-mysterious virus. Within weeks, schools, stores and workplaces across the country shut down — measures that later sparked debate about their effectiveness, particularly regarding remote learning’s impact on students.
When asked if public health officials overreacted, Washington firmly defended their actions.
“The reality is millions of people lost their life as a result of COVID, and so I don’t think any reaction or efforts to reduce the number of lives lost is effort wasted,” he said.
The toll has been significant: Approximately 2,000 deaths in Mecklenburg County, nearly 30,000 across North Carolina and 1.2 million nationwide. At its peak, COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death in the United States.
“For a condition to go from not being the cause of death to being the third leading cause of death — more than liver disease, more than most cancers — it’s heartbreaking,” Washington said.
Thanks to rapidly developed vaccines, COVID-19 has dropped to 10th on the list of leading causes of death in the U.S. Public health infrastructure built during the pandemic continues to benefit the community, including wastewater surveillance systems.
“It gives us an early detection, early warning system at a very low cost,” Washington explained. “We’ve had increases in Mpox activity, for example, last summer and we got first detection on wastewater.”
These advances, Washington believes, have better positioned the county for future public health emergencies.
Contact Ben Thompson at bthompson@wcnc.com and follow him on Facebook, X and Instagram.
