Where We Go From Here

(Opinion) I want to share today's update along with some of my thoughts about where we are currently and our choice about where we are headed. Douglas County has 5 more cases for Thursday. 2 new confirmed, 3 presumptive. We now have 76 cases, 64 confirmed, 12 presumptive. We now have zero hospitalizations! In total, we have had 6,254 negative test results. This shows that Douglas County has not had very many people contract this disease which is excellent. Many of the cases we have had are a direct result of people traveling outside the county, becoming infected and then returning. Our low numbers of infections have no doubt played a significant role in keeping the disease out of our long term care facilities as well as our retirement and nursing homes where our most vulnerable citizens reside. Where this disease is widespread in a community, it inevitably makes its way into the these long term care facilities, as we have seen all across the US. I have seen many people ask why cases are reported so much and not recoveries, and hospitalizations and deaths. To be honest, all the numbers are important, but some are more helpful for showing us where we are headed rather than where we've already been. We've done excellent numbers wise up until this point. But as cases continue to rise in our county, the risk continues to rise for workers in our long term care facilities to contract the virus and then unknowingly transmit it to the vulnerable residents among us. Lots of cases also make it much more difficult, and eventually impossible to adequately perform contact tracing to warn people that have come into contact with a person that contracted the virus. At that point, it becomes very difficult to suppress the virus without taking drastic measures to slow the spread of the virus, such as closing things down once again like California just did. The goal is to avoid the drastic measures that heap more pain on our community. Also, the best way for schools to have in-classroom learning is to have a low level of spread in the community. The same for sports. The better we do, the more "normal" things can be. There appear to be two goals in the US, and even the world right now. In some places, the goal is to keep cases as low as possible and squash the virus out so life can be as normal as possible. In others, it appears the goal is to prevent the absolute worst case scenario and take measures only once hospitals are close to filling up. I think the wise goal is the first. It makes the best use of the painful measures we've already gone through and helps a community avoid as much future pain as possible. Where things go in Douglas County is largely up the community. If everyone works together and remains vigilant with masks, distancing, careful travel etc, we really could save a lot of lives and keep our every day life disruption to a minimum, especially compared to what other communities across the US will be experiencing in the weeks and months ahead. But we will all have to work together. The fight against this virus really is a team effort. We are in this together. 🤙