NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) – Wednesday marks five years since the Tennessee Department of Health announced the state had received its first positive test results for a case of COVID-19.
Officials said the patient was an adult male from Williamson County who had recently traveled out of state. He reportedly had a mild illness and was isolated at home.
“We are working closely with local health care partners to identify contacts and contain spread of this disease in our communities,” said Tennessee Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey on March 5, 2020. “We’ve been anticipating the identification of COVID-19 cases in Tennessee. At this time, the overall risk to the general public remains low. We are continuing to work with the CDC and other agencies to provide guidance to Tennesseans to protect their health.”
While no timing is ideal for COVID-19 cases to arise, this was a particularly difficult time for many Middle Tennesseeans who had seven tornadoes roll through just two days prior. There were 25 deaths across the mid-state, 19 of which were in Putnam County.
“It was a traumatic experience, not only for me but way more so for everybody that was affected,” said Cookeville Mayor Ricky Shelton. “It forever changed our community.”
According to data from the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH), from March 5, 2020, to Jan. 11, 2025, Tennessee recorded more than 2.8 million COVID-19 cases leading to over 57,000 hospitalizations and upwards of 31,000 deaths.
Gov. Bill Lee told News 2 there are many lessons Tennessee learned from the pandemic.
📧 Have breaking news come to you: Subscribe to News 2 email alerts →
“We didn’t know what we were dealing with when we started, but now, on the backside of it, we know a whole lot more about how to respond in a situation like that,” Lee said. “We’ve learned a lot about the fact, I think broadly, that we need to trust the people and the population and our citizens with decisions around their health. Government is not the answer to all of the challenges that we have going forward and we need to rely more heavily on the people themselves.”
Shelton said his biggest takeaway from leading during the Coronavirus pandemic was that you can’t always believe what you hear.
“You’ve seen these things that have been proven out, some of the things that we thought were the right things to do were the wrong things to do, so I’m proud that we took a stance,” Shelton said.
Throughout the troubled times, Shelton was proud to say that the Volunteer State lived up to its name.
“Not only the thousands of people that came into our community to help from various organizations across the country, but neighbor helping neighbor and friend helping friend and friend helping stranger quite honestly because we were all in it together,” Shelton said.
At the start of this year, TDH moved toward pan-respiratory surveillance and response by removing COVID-19 from lab reporting and updating provider reporting to include only COVID-19-associated deaths in people over 18 years old.
