As part of Maine Public Deep Dive: Coronavirus, looking at Maine’s first year of the pandemic, Morning Edition host Irwin Gratz spoke with Maine Gov. Janet Mills.
I want to start at the beginning. When did you realize that you were going to have to begin taking emergency actions?
Mills: Members of the administration were aware of and watching the situation very carefully, starting in Dec. 2019, and Jan. 2020. But obviously, it was early March, when it really hit home for the rest of us that this was a serious thing. When the World Health Organization declared it to be a pandemic. And then, remember, the NBA canceled its remaining season, the remaining games in the season. And then the president canceled travel for certain countries, and the cruise ships were docked, not being able to unload passengers. And then on March 12, in Maine, we discovered our first case.
Was there a moment though, where you gathered perhaps with a couple of other key administration people and decided we have to act?
March 2 is when we decided we needed to gather our experts within the administration and form a coronavirus response team. That’s when we began to rely so much on Maine Center for Disease Control Director Dr. Nirav Shah, Health and Human Services Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew, Education Commissioner Pender Makin, Economic and Community Development Commissioner Heather Johnson and many others, and people in the staff, to start gathering as much information as possible. And making sure we detected any outbreaks in the state of Maine. Any cases. And then of course, on March 1, we did document our first case. And then March 15, was when I issued a proclamation of a state of civil emergency. And that was, frankly, gut wrenching. It was an extremely difficult thing to do. And the Legislature was behind us. The Legislature was still in session for a few more days. And we all conferred and shared as much information as we could. And the Legislature of course stood up some additional emergency funding, and agreed to adjourn until it was safe to gather in session. But it was gut wrenching because I wasn’t sure when before this had ever been done. And it felt like not the kind of thing that one runs for governor to do.
As you issued those first orders, did you have a sense of how long this was going to last?
Oh, nobody did. Nobody did. Nobody could have. And we watched the progress of the virus in Italy and other countries. And then in England. And it was horrifying, terrifying. And then we watched it in other states. And we thought, well, Maine is a small state. We’re kind of insulated in some ways. And of course, the Canadian border shut down. And so we felt at the same time threatened and protected. Nobody runs for governor thinking, ‘One day, I’ll tell people to stay home,’ or thinking that one day they will ban baseball games, football games, graduations, weddings, funerals, Fourth of July parades, closing bars. Nobody dreams of doing that. Nobody wants to do that. It’s the last thing on your mind.
I think it also goes without saying you probably wish you had had more and better guidance from the Trump administration. But I’m wondering, did you have enough tools, did you think, at your disposal to steer Maine on a safer path, regardless of what Washington was going to do?
Well, we obviously talked with other governors and other administrations and other public health officials in other states and the federal CDC. We watched carefully what Anthony Fauci was recommending. And we listened to the U.S. CDC. We watched what other countries were doing — what succeeded and what failed. A lot of things that failed. We didn’t want that creeping into our state, that kind of disaster. We had tools, obviously. We immediately examined all the statutes on the books regarding emergency declarations. And we were very, very careful to delimit every executive order as closely as possible, tailoring it to the needs of the day, the facts and the science, and the medical information that we had. Every single order was based on public health data, and the best science available to us, and not on politics.
You mentioned that as you surveyed what others were doing, there were a lot of mistakes. What are a couple of the mistakes that Maine avoided?
The mistakes that were made in Florida and other states where, for instance, during spring break a year ago, the beaches were packed and crowded and there were outbreaks as a result of that. Mistakes made in South Dakota, where they had a gathering of more than 250,000 I think, motorcyclists, bikers, and then there were huge outbreaks. Mistakes made in states like South Dakota, where they said, ‘We don’t need to provide any protocols or advise people to use masks or distancing,’ or any of the commonsense public health measures that we’ve taken. And those states saw massive outbreaks and deaths, and events that overwhelmed their hospitals and other health care facilities. We avoided that.
Of course, in the midst of all of those came the police killing of George Floyd. And then some of the protests that followed here. How did that kind of complicate what you were trying to accomplish?
The repercussions across Maine and across our country were tremendous. Obviously, we wanted people to be able to protest peacefully. And we worked with law enforcement to make sure that peaceful protests were allowed all over our state, but also that the protesters would try their best to conform to public health requirements, protocols, to make sure that they didn’t inadvertently cause outbreaks of the virus and with deadly consequences.
You know, overall, Maine has had some of the lowest coronavirus numbers in the country. What are the things that Maine has been doing right?
Second lowest in the nation in total hospitalizations. Third lowest in total number of cases. And now we’re above 20% in the number of people, the percentage of population vaccinated at least with one dose. And so what we have done right, I think, is let public health speak for itself. Not let politics involve itself in the decision-making, but to allow all voices to be heard. We’ve worked with the business community and the working community, working men and women with sectors of the economy all across the board, listened to them, paid a great deal of attention to them. And there have been some very difficult conversations. But I think what we’ve done right, somehow or other, was to gain the cooperation of the majority, the vast majority of Maine people, in compliance with basic public health measures and protocols that have kept everybody safe.
We were doing so well last summer. I’m just curious as to what you were thinking when those case numbers started to climb last fall.
They climbed after a couple of things. And I can’t say that there’s a direct causal effect, but timewise the numbers climbed after the November elections, the Thanksgiving and December holidays. Same time. In November, several of the vaccines were approved. In mid-December, we started vaccinating people. So it was really a race against time, and it still is because of the variants. But what we’ve tried to do every step of the way is tell the people Maine the truth. The bold truth. Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly of this pandemic, and here’s what we know, and here’s what you can do to help protect yourselves, your families, your neighbors, the public of Maine, and to protect the livelihoods of Maine people at the same time. It’s an incredible balancing act that we go through every week, every day.
Let’s look ahead a little bit. As you mentioned, vaccine distributions are underway. You’ve laid out a plan for much-reduced restrictions by the summer. Are you confident we’re going to get there?
I have a great deal of trust in the U.S. CDC, and in the administration in Washington. And I’ve actually had personal conversations with the president and CEO of Pfizer, who has assured me that there will be several-hundred-million more doses of Pfizer by the end of April and May. And the president is like a dog on a bone getting those vaccines out there. We’re in a little bit of a lull this week and next week, but it’s gonna come back. It’s the largest, most logistically challenging vaccination effort any state or country has ever undertaken. So it’s incredibly fraught with confusion, frustration and difficulties, but we’re getting there. People have to be patient, but we are going to get there. And people are going to be vaccinated. And we’re going to defeat the variants as well, because we’re using every fact, every piece of medical science we have at our disposal to make sure that we do what’s right. Maintaining the distances, social distancing, maintaining the mask wearing, protecting people, because even the vaccines we have, that are incredibly effective, 1 out of 20 people may still get sick or even die from this virus. Even after having been vaccinated. So we’re balancing caution with optimism, and we’re dying to get our economy back on a roll. We’ve done very well, all things considered. And we’re going to continue to do well.
Any final thoughts?
Something Eleanor Roosevelt said during World War II. She told the American people, ‘You must do what you think you cannot do.’ In Maine, we’ve done what we thought we could not do. And we’re putting it behind us.
For more stories in Deep Dive: Coronavirus, visit mainepublic.org/coronavirus.
