The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

Honestly, it’s not you, it’s us.

As these extremely inconvenient — no, let’s call them what they are — horrid, restrictions on our social freedom clamp down on society and commerce in favor of health, that’s a concept some either don’t get, don’t want to get, or just refuse to believe, and that affects us all.

Whether they’re just delayed in getting the information because they have lives not tied to any media, or they’re just stubborn because they think this another Y2K-like false alarm, or they just can’t deal with the stress and want to pretend this will pass in no time, they aren’t just annoying, they’re dangerous.

And if you insist on gathering in groups unnecessarily, so are you.

No, it’s not your right.

It’s no one’s right to poo-poo the leadership advice on how best to combat the threat that is far greater than that posed by influenza each year. Doing so risks lives of people you know and love, who, like all of us, have no immunity to this brand new virus that causes the illness dubbed COVID-19.

Their advice, their warning, is that the only way to combat this contagion is to stop it before it starts in any given area by clamping down on meetings.

The danger in the U.S. is that we follow the path Italy has fallen on, described in hellish terms by hospital workers who must make wartime-like decisions about which patient gets to live, which one gets the life-saving treatment in a hospital overwhelmed by the virus raging through their population. Slowing that progression down is the game plan that can keep healthcare options open for those worst cases, and for those who need it for entirely unrelated reasons.

True, many people who get it experience mild symptoms or none. But some people die and many are extremely sick. That could be you or your friend who thinks this is no big deal.

It’s a big, deadly deal that requires a shared sacrifice unlike anything this country has seen since World War II.

Any success we have in fighting it will come because we did it together, all of us.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher