MOUNT VERNON — Artistic Director Yvette Burdick stood on a riser in front of 75 people, a cordless microphone looped around one ear, a piano player to her right side and a laptop open to Zoom on her left.
“We’ve got a lot to get through tonight,” she told the Skagit Valley Chorale members gathered inside a Bible study room at the Salem Lutheran Church in Mount Vernon.
The March 11, 2025 practice looked similar to the one on March 10, 2020. Except at the time, members were avoiding hugging and trying to limit close interactions amid growing COVID-19 fears. An email from Burdick had gone out warning members about the novel coronavirus, stating if they didn’t feel comfortable coming to practice, to skip it.
But it was too late.
Days later, members were starting to feel ill, including Burdick. Out of the 61 members in attendance that night, 52 were sick in the week after the gathering. Three went to the hospital. Two died.
The singing practice was one of the first confirmed superspreader events in the U.S. at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. The chorale outbreak made national news. It confirmed new fears the virus could spread via close contact transmission or aerosol transmission. But it was also credited with changing the way epidemiologists and public health experts fought the disease and provided guidance for the public.
“Rarely do we have such a clear, defined cohort where we can actually contact every single person,” said former Skagit County epidemiologist Lea Hamner, who wrote the study on the superspreader event. “We wanted to share complete information to tell the whole story, and we actually had the time.”
Washington state became the first U.S. epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in late February 2020. It took about a month for the virus, which originated in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, to make its way to Snohomish County.
Public health officials announced on Jan. 21, 2020, that the first case of COVID-19 had been reported in the U.S.: a 35-year-old man in Everett who had returned from Wuhan. He survived and was later released.
“We didn’t know anything about COVID,” Washington state Epidemiologist Scott Lindquist said. “We had that first case and the first thing people asked me was, ‘How long do we have to isolate this person?’ I was like ‘I don’t know.”’
Since the first reported COVID-19 death in the U.S., at least 1.22 million Americans have died from the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Local loss — and a catalyst
The two members of the Skagit Valley Chorale would become some of the first to die in the country.
Nancy Hamilton, or Nicki, was a brassy New York-raised woman who lived with her husband Victor in Mount Vernon. She’d gone to choir practice that night. Even when she started to feel sick, she continued to run around town on errands despite Victor’s protests.
“It got to the point where my dad had her isolated in their bedroom,” said Elsa Chichester, Nicki’s step-daughter, who recalled the phone conversation she had with Victor about Nicki. “He was sleeping in the spare room. A day or two went by and he said, ‘She’s not getting any better.’”
Victor called 911 and medics took Nicki to the hospital. He told Chichester where to find his checkbook and will, and that she was in charge of the pets if something were to happen to him and his wife.
Nicki, 83, died alone in a hospital on March 21. Victor, meanwhile, never got COVID.
Local officials urged the public stay home and avoid gatherings, so Victor mourned alone at home in the shadow of his wife’s items.
“He went with the medics, he picked up her belongings and that was it,” Chichester said. “He never got to see her there so he never got to really have closure.”
Carole Rae Woodmansee, a beloved Mount Vernon piano teacher and worship leader who went to the practice, died March 27 on her 81st birthday. Her family was able to say goodbye a few days before her death.
Carole’s son Joe Woodmansee had called his mom right before the rehearsal asking her to stay home.
“Her attitude was I’m going to live my life … she was not too concerned about dying and going to heaven,” Joe said.
‘That’s 60 miles away’
On Feb. 27, 2020, President Donald Trump said during a White House briefing that COVID-19 was “going to disappear.”
Things changed rapidly in the hours after the statement.
Life Care Center, a nursing home in Kirkland, had two residents die on Feb. 26, after the virus had been incubating in the center for nearly two weeks. A Mardi Gras celebration still went on, infecting dozens of residents and staff.
On Feb. 28, a man in his 50s died at Evergreen Health Hospital from COVID-19. Inslee made the announcement a day later, then declared a state of emergency that would last more than two years.
The Skagit Valley Chorale board and Burdick were talking about the possibility of canceling practice. But some board members didn’t want to live in fear and there was a lack of information from health officials about the risk of gathering, Burdick said.
“We knew it was in Kirkland from the news but that’s 60 miles away,” she said. “We encouraged people, if they weren’t feeling well to not come, but if they were concerned for their risks, not to come also. It was people making their own choices.”
In the days that followed, Carole stayed in the Skagit Valley hospital and her family struggled to get in contact with her doctor. The family received chaotic information from nurses about their mom’s status, one minute being told she might not make it through the night to being told she was being treated like she would survive.
“We had a couple of days of false security that maybe she’s not as bad as they thought,” Joe said. “The next call we got from the hospital was a palliative care person calling to tell us that our mom’s almost gone.”
The family’s faith kept them going, Joe explained. They believed if it was their mom’s time, then she was going to join her husband who had died in 2003.
“She passed away on her 81st birthday which was, to us, perfect,” he said. “We get to celebrate both her coming and going on that day.”
At the same time Carole was in the hospital, a Bellingham health center providing rehabilitation and skilled nursing services in the York neighborhood experienced a COVID outbreak among residents and employees in which 29 people tested positive for the virus.
Whatcom County health officials said at the time that a lack of testing equipment meant they would not be able to proactively test residents and staff at other skilled nursing facilities.
Also in Bellingham, a doctor at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center went viral after he decried the hospital’s safety precautions in the early days of the pandemic. Dr. Ming Lin was fired in late March and settled with the hospital five years later after a lengthy court battle.
COVID-related hospital admissions in Washington peaked. The shutdown was extended.
“Jay Inslee made some really hard choices,” Lindquist said, noting the former governor’s stay-at-home mandate. “He saved a lot of people’s lives. A lot of people that didn’t even know he saved their lives were those that really didn’t agree with him.”
Five years later
Skagit Valley Chorale members practiced virtually until they could have their first in-person rehearsal outdoors in October 2021. Burdick required chorale members to be vaccinated.
“It was cold already, but we were together and it was exciting to be able to sing together,” she said. There was also a sense of uncertainty as members understood the responsibility and risk they were taking to practice together.
Burdick has also struggled with the burden that came from holding a rehearsal that turned into an infamous superspreader event. Colleagues told her it could’ve been any choir in the U.S.
“I could have made the choice not to do it and people would not have to die,” she said. “I’m happy to say I let go of that. I don’t see it that way.”
The effects of COVID linger: patients suffering from long COVID are still looking for a cure, some people choose to wear masks in public, and schools and businesses are still recovering from the prolonged shutdown.
At the Skagit Valley Chorale practice on Tuesday, March 11, some members wore masks, and three homemade air filters were spaced out between sections.
Lindquist said while he believes Washington is more prepared for a pandemic than it was before COVID, there’s still room to improve.
“I don’t feel that most Americans like to be told what to do and be restricted,” he said. “They like to have a voice in it, and so I think having a little more public voice and understanding in the decisions that are being made to control spread within their communities would be an improvement.”
Joe Woodmansee believes the government overstepped in its decision to enact social distancing, shutdowns and vaccine mandates without debate.
“The first thing I would have done is I would have invited a vigorous debate about all aspects of COVID,” he said. “The government shut down the debate about COVID. Any counter opinion, they shut down. That’s not the American way.”
Lindquist acknowledged current politics are impeding any progress or lessons learned from COVID.
Recent cuts to federal spending on public health have impacted scientists working on infectious disease detection and prevention, according to WBUR, a public radio station in Boston.
“I think we should be fully funded,” Lindquist said. “We should have infrastructure that is a great surveillance system to pick up new and emerging viruses.”
For the families of Woodmansee and Hamilton, talking about their mom and stepmom is another chance to remember them.
Joe Woodmansee just celebrated his 65th birthday. “The last big family birthday party we had was at that same house with my mom on my 60th birthday. So I was thinking last night about my mom. That’s how we remember.”
Victor Hamilton died last August after a short illness. During the four years after Nicki died, Chichester involved Hamilton as much as possible with her family’s life, including “Wednesdays with Grandpa” when he would come over for a few hours and help his grandkids with virtual school.
“If [COVID] hadn’t happened, I think my dad and Nicki would have had more time together,” she said. “They both lived a really good life — there was a lot you could learn from both of them.”
Annie Todd is CDN’s criminal justice/enterprise reporter; reach her at annietodd@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 130.
