SAVANNAH, Ga. () — Five years ago, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

That same day, Savannah Mayor Van Johnson announced the city’s largest downtown gathering was canceled.

“Out of abundance of caution for public health safety and welfare, Savannah’s St Patrick’s festival and parade will not go on as planned to prevent transmission from large open area events,” Mayor Johnson said on March 11, 2020.

Today, Johnson said this was a hard decision for council to make, but ultimately it was the right one.

“We knew it was airborne,” he said. “We knew that people were sick. People were dying around the country and around the world.”

The parade was canceled again in 2021. Both decisions backed by health professionals like Dr. Timothy Connelly, internal medicine physician at Memorial Health.

“It was a very scary time. Had we had a large gathering like we’re having this weekend, it’d have been a disaster,” Dr. Connelly said.

Johnson echoed that, “I would have cast a death spell on our community.”

Since 2020, nearly 1,000 people have died from COVID-19 in Chatham County, according to Georgia DPH.

“It was not a good time. It was not a fun time for anybody, but it was a time where we came together as a community,” Connelly said.

Both men called this the hardest time of their lives. Dr. Connelly was spending long hours away from his loved ones, providing care to those with the disease. Mayor Johnson told , he was trying his best to lead the city in the right direction.

“I really reflect on how blessed the Savannah-Chatham County community is and how blessed we were during that time,” Johnson said. “I’m grateful for that journey. It was a very difficult journey. We lost a lot of good citizens of Savannah during this journey. But the fact is we learned some lessons.”

Those lessons include how to handle outbreaks like this, keeping up with hygiene and physical health, mandating masks and getting vaccines, according to Johnson.

Connelly believes that in five more years, people will look back on COVID-19 from a historical standpoint, however he doesn’t believe the illness will ever go away completely.

Currently, Memorial Health has four patients being treated for Covid.