 Thousands of people packed CenturyLink Field on March 7th for Seattle Sounders' game. The crowd size was bigger than what I expected. I had no idea. 28 hours earlier, the public health officer for King County in Seattle sent an email saying he wanted to cancel all large group gatherings because of COVID-19. So why did the game continue? ProPublica in the Seattle Times obtained hundreds of pages of emails between public officials that shed light on what happened behind the scenes. The country's first confirmed case of COVID-19 had been announced in Washington State in January. By February 29th, King County announced a cluster of cases. Today, Public Health Seattle and King County is announcing three new presumptive positive cases of novel coronavirus COVID-19, including one person who died. It was the first known COVID-19 death in the United States. The same day, Duchin sent an email to public health colleagues advising against cancelling mass gatherings. The next day, the Sounders played their season opener in Seattle with a crowd of 40,000. Over the next few days, the county's cases and deaths kept growing. Six people have died so far, all of them in Washington State. And the governor of Washington weighed in on mass gatherings. As you know, we have encouraged people who are responsible for large gatherings to give consideration whether it really makes sense to carry those on right now or whether it's better to pause those at this moment. On March 4th, Public Health Communications Director James Appa emailed Duchin about a worker at Century Link Field who had tested positive for COVID-19 two days before. County officials and local sports teams exchanged dozens of emails discussing how to announce the news to the public. An executive with the Seattle Seahawks complained that another team had drafted a hysteria-inducing statement. A CDC spokesman advised that the risk to attendees was low. The same day, the official Facebook page for King County Public Health shared an image encouraging people to avoid large crowds. The county published a press release about the infected worker at 3 p.m. on March 5th, writing that upcoming events at the stadium would continue. But just an hour later, the health department replied to a post on Facebook with a distinctly different message. Jeff Duchin sent the email about canceling all large group gatherings on March 6th. But that didn't happen. Instead, a meeting was scheduled for the next morning and another scheduled for the day after. The game continued as planned on March 7th. Four days later, after dozens of people had died in King County from the virus, the county banned all gatherings of more than 250 people. We expect a large-scale outbreak in weeks, and this will be a very difficult time. It's similar to what you might think of as an infectious disease equivalent of a major earthquake that's going to shake us for weeks and weeks. There's no way to know how many people could have been infected at the game. But cases of COVID-19 surged across the region in the weeks that followed.