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Burdick sent out emails advising anyone who had symptoms linked to Covid-19—coughing, fever, or shortness of breath—to skip rehearsals. Anyone who might have been at greater risk of getting severely ill, whether they were getting treated for cancer or had diabetes, should consider staying home. More than a hundred people converged on Fellowship Hall for a typical rehearsal. On March 3, 2020, only seventy-eight people came.

A week later, on March 10, Skagit County health officials notified a retired nurse's aide named Susanne Jones that she was their first confirmed case of Covid-19. Jones had gotten tested after she learned that a friend with whom she had recently square-danced had died of the disease. "Suddenly my annoying allergy symptoms seemed horrifying," she later told a reporter. "And I thought of all the places I'd been."

County officials did not close down schools or stores. On the afternoon of March 10, the health department simply posted an update on its website. Howard Leibrand, Skagit County's health officer, urged people to do what they could to slow the spread of Covid-19. "The community should postpone non-essential events and gatherings of ten or more people," he said.

The 130,000 residents of Skagit County are spread thinly across nineteen hundred twenty square miles—an area larger than Rhode Island and not much smaller than Delaware. The county health department expected its recommendations to take a few days to seep across the region. When Burdick and sixty singers converged that evening on the Mount Vernon Presbyterian Church, none of them knew that someone in Skagit County had Covid-19.

Three members of the choir arrived early to set up for practice. They switched on the lights and turned on the furnace, setting the thermostat to 68 degrees. They arranged a hundred twenty chairs. Backlund recalled the choir being a little on edge that night, without the usual hugs and handshakes. "You felt like you were looking over your shoulder, but we were being really careful," she said.

At about six thirty, the singers sat down in the same seats they took every week. But that night the hall was half empty. The doors were shut. Once the temperature rose high enough, the furnace shut off, and air stopped flowing out of the ventilation system. The hall filled with singing—not with sneezes or coughs or blowing noses. No one displayed any symptoms.

For forty minutes, the choir sang unmasked. Burdick then took half the singers to the church's sanctuary to practice a number. The other half stayed behind in Fellowship Hall and rehearsed "The Shoop Shoop Song," a 1964 rhythm-and-blues hit by Betty Everett.

After forty-five minutes, Burdick's group returned to Fellowship Hall for a ten-minute break. Some singers converged around a table, grabbing oranges for a snack. Some headed to the bathroom. One woman left during the break. Carolynn Comstock heard from another singer that she had a sore throat. The rest of the singers rehearsed for another fifty minutes before finishing at nine. The singers folded up their own chairs and loaded them on a rolling rack before leaving. Comstock let her husband, Jim Owen, fold her chair for her. At sixty-two, she had retired from teaching but was helping Owen at his construction company. She had recently injured her shoulder. The singers went home. The church went dark.

The next day, Governor Inslee held a press conference to deliver an update on Covid-19. The state's cases were climbing. To check the spread, Inslee announced a ban on gatherings of more than two hundred fifty people in three counties in Washington. He also recommended that everyone across the state engage in an unfamiliar practice with an odd name: social distancing. "Individuals should try to stay six feet or at least an arm's length from each other," he announced. Beyond that distance, Inslee implied, people would be safe from infection. Burdick, Backlund, and the rest of the board decided to cancel their next rehearsal.

Three days later, Mark Backlund began to feel low. He shuffled off to take a nap. The phone rang, and Ruth picked it up. It was Comstock. She told Ruth that she couldn't come over that night because she was running a fever of 100 degrees. As the evening progressed, Ruth was overwhelmed by what she called "a weird fever feeling."

She had had her share of fevers before, but this experience felt different. "I thought, 'Oh boy, is this it?' " Ruth said. "I thought it couldn't be, because we were so careful about everything you're supposed to be careful about."

It was indeed Covid-19. Dozens of singers who had attended the March 10 practice fell ill. Before the end of the month, Nancy Hamilton and Carole Woodmansee were dead.

Ruth was both horrified and baffled. The choir had followed all the rules, but Covid-19 had managed to slip into their midst. Whoever had brought it to Fellowship Hall had not spread it to neighbors by contaminating doorknobs or by coughing droplets that fell to the floor within a few feet of others. "You couldn't all be that far apart and getting sick at the same time," Ruth said. It seemed to her that the virus must have wafted through the air.

Two weeks after the March 10 rehearsal, the World Health Organization swatted down that notion. On their Twitter account, the agency wrote: