Since March, Santa Clara’s top health official has given countless updates on the pandemic in her county, delivering difficult messages and sobering numbers.

But Dr. Sara Cody fought back tears on Tuesday as she spoke about the tragic toll the COVID-19 surge has had on the region during a Board of Supervisors meeting.

“We are in very bad shape here with the pandemic,” Cody began at the meeting, now posted on YouTube. “… We’re in a place that we never expected to be and we certainly never wanted to be, especially given all the tremendous work and collective sacrifice by every single member of our community.”

She went on, “Today, unfortunately, I mostly have very, very difficult news to share with you all. … We have very dark days ahead. Today, we had over 1,000 new cases reported, and we crossed the 50,000 case mark. Fifty thousand people in our county. And today we are reporting 24 new deaths.”

Stopping for a moment, Cody continued through tears that were far more impactful than the graph displayed on the screen. “We have lost 553 people in our county,” she said. “COVID, in fact, is on track to be among the five leading causes of death here in our county. Our pandemic locally is out of control. … Our health care system is quite stretched. Not to the breaking point, but steadily marching toward that point.”

Cody’s emotional response was an attestation to the dire situation in the county that led the way when the Bay Area first shut down in March. At the time, Santa Clara County was at the center of the region’s pandemic and, despite taking bold actions from the start, the county is now faced with its worst wave of cases yet.

After going over the grave numbers, Cody called on the state of California to meet the moment.

“We cannot normalize this,” she said. “… It has become pretty clear that we do need to take more serious action. We need a statewide action to keep people from dying. And we must remember that this pandemic has devastated our health, our economy, our sense of well-being, but there are things that we can do, and our economy will not recover, and the small businesses that are suffering, they cannot succeed if their customers and their workerss are dying. … The one single thing we must do is bring this pandemic under control and slow it down.”

Cody also offered a glimmer of hope in the long fight, sharing the first 5,850 doses of Pfizer vaccines arrived in the county Tuesday.  This batch is the first of the initial 17,550 allocated by the state. The remaining doses will be shipped from the manufacturer directly to the hospitals later this week.

All 17,550 doses will be distributed to people in the highest risk categories: front line health care workers at acute care hospitals as well as staff and residents at skilled nursing facilities.