3 years in, Bonnie Henry says B.C. isn't in a better place today to deal with a new pandemic

How were you talking about COVID-19 the day it was declared a global pandemic?

If you were Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia's provincial health officer, it was similar to plenty of others: a mix of worry and caution, but in retrospect, a wildly optimistic mindset at what the future would hold. 

"We must all step up our social distancing. This is not forever. This is for the coming weeks," said Henry at a March 11, 2020, news conference, where another seven cases of the "novel coronavirus," as it was then called, were confirmed in B.C. 

Two additional cases had been confirmed at the Lynn Valley Care Centre, where a resident had died a couple of days earlier, but "other than that, things have settled," she said, not knowing that 19 more people would die there in the next seven weeks. 

"We still don't know the role that children play in spreading these viruses … at the moment, I do not feel there's a need to close schools across the province," she said, not knowing all schools in the province would be closed six days later.

In an interview with CBC News to mark the anniversary of the pandemic, Henry spoke about the ways British Columbia, in her mind, had succeeded in dealing with the last three years. 

WATCH | Dr. Bonnie Henry warns B.C. is not prepared for the next pandemic:

But she also acknowledged the wear of the last three years. 

"It was really my job that day to put out the information in a way that people could understand and to give people a sense that, yeah, that this might get very bad, but there were things that we could do," she said, thinking about her thoughts when it began.

"I didn't think it was going to be this long and this hard."

In looking at how Henry talked about the pandemic at the beginning, there are clear ways her mindset has stayed the same, including an emphasis on personal responsibility and on guidelines instead of orders, such as when she asked about travel restrictions on that day, three years ago.   

"If you feel you're willing to take those risks of being caught up in [a] quarantine ... those are personal decisions that you have to make," she said. 

It's a perspective she continues to hold. 

"We know that this virus causes harms, but we also know that the measures that we put in place to deal with the virus caused harms.