Back in January, when Patricia Dowd became sick with flu-like symptoms and had to cancel plans to go to a funeral, it would be impossible to fathom what her illness foretold for California and the rest of the nation.

Dowd, a 57-year-old manager for a Silicon Valley semiconductor company, seemed to recover. But within about a week, Dowd’s daughter found her mother dead at her San Jose home. It was Feb. 6, and Dowd is believed to be the first person to die of COVID-19 on American soil.

In those early days, when Dowd’s death wasn’t publicly known, coronavirus seemed to be a distant, contained outbreak posing little threat. Something that might be held in check by keeping a cruise ship filled with infected passengers in limbo off the coast of San Francisco, or by aggressively screening flights coming in from China.

Today, COVID-19 is everywhere. As of Thursday — 10 months after Dowd fell ill — more than 1 million Californians have been confirmed to be infected.

Read the full story on LATimes.com.