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 governor asked this question, which is: “OK, so how many days of PPE do we have in our stockpile?” Budd recalled. “The National Strategic Stockpile. And the answer was we have one day. We have one day! And that was the moment for me when I said, ‘OK, we have got to stand something up really quickly.’”Testing marked another moment when the team realized that Oklahoma was essentially on its own. “Dr. Shrum and I were sitting at the Governor’s Mansion in the pavilion because that was a temporary space that had been set up for us to meet,” said Elizabeth Pollard, secretary of science and innovation. “And we realized that we didn’t have any tests coming to the state of Oklahoma and how were we going to get what we needed?”Now, the focus has shifted to the vaccination campaign."Whatever we can do to get more people to take the vaccine -- that's really what I wish for more than everything else,” Budd said.That work continues, with vaccinations accelerating every day. A year later that fight against COVID-19 is still underway.