CORNING, Calif.
Sonia Bravo lives with her family off a gravel road near the Sacramento River, on a tranquil two acres where they can hear roosters crowing and gaze at snow-capped Mt. Shasta in the distance.
As urban areas locked down last spring and people got sick and died from the coronavirus, they felt far removed.
“We had a mindset like, ‘We’re not going to get it. That’s just in the cities,’” said Bravo, 34.
How she wishes that had been true.
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Last summer, everyone in the house Bravo shares with eight family members got COVID-19: Bravo, her husband, her 7-year-old twin boys. Her mom and dad. Her two sisters. Her brother.
RED BLUFF, Calif.
Jeremiah Fears sat beneath an elk head mounted on the wall of the volunteer fire department in his little city and rolled up his sleeve for what he hopes is a step toward normality: his first dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
“If we can get vaccinated and do our thing to protect one another and ourselves, we can hurry up and open and go from there,” said Fears, chief of the Corning Police Department. “I know there’s controversy behind it. But it is what it is.”
Fears had come to a vaccination clinic in Corning population 7,600 aimed at firefighters and police officers. But in that fire station was a hint of the pandemic skepticism that runs deep in rural Northern California: two elderly people, both on dialysis, who were coming to get their shots.