All activity centered on the National Guard training building at 63rd and Kelley. Gov. Kevin Stitt was living nearby on the premises while the Governor’s Mansion was being renovated, so the National Guard center was the epicenter of COVID-19 response in the early days of the pandemic. The Governor’s Solutions Task Force met seven days a week in the early days, all day long. Several of them sat down with KOCO 5 to discuss their work in COVID-19’s early days. “We had been looking and watching Wuhan and it became relatively clear to us that you weren’t going to stop the spread,” said Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino of the Oklahoma National Guard. “But to answer your question, the Thunder game was just something that – that chances of that happening and the impact of that was just a wake-up call for us for sure that, OK, this is here, it’s in Oklahoma.”State Chief Operating Officer John Budd remembered a meeting in the state’s emergency operations bunker.“The gover