If you’re not taking this seriously, you’re wrong.

One of the most highly valued commenters on my blog is Dr. Sam LeFevre, who, as an official with the Utah Department of Health, has been deeply involved with the Utah’s efforts to manage and to combat the coronavirus pandemic.  Tonight, he posted a comment on my blog that was so important, in my judgment, that I asked (and received) his permission to share it on the main portion of my blog.  Here it is:

Since this morning’s public dashboard update the numbers have gone up just shy of another 200 for the state of Utah. The current big influencer is a large food industry worksite outbreak in north Utah. I have to be careful not to name names but it can be read about here: https://www.sltrib.com/news…

We are also starting to see the effects of Memorial Day weekend. We expect to see the effects of the ongoing Salt Lake City protest/riots sometime mid-next week – although many of the weekend rioters were out-of-towners who have gone back to where they came from.

My staff and I are doing informal surveys of mask wearing in public places. For Davis, Salt Lake, Summit, Tooele, Utah, Wasatch, and Weber counties, where my staff and I live, the compliance rate is about 23%.

More than half of Utahans believe that COVID is either a Democratic hoax that will disappear after the November elections, or is just a mild cold-like illness. See: https://kutv.com/news/local…

In the world, COVID is just coming of age and we are starting to see the publication of assessments of the long-term or chronic health effects among COVID victims. We noted during the course of the outbreak that COVID had an unusual ability to attack peripheral nerves. People lost (whether permanently remains to be seen) their senses of smell, taste and hearing (those senses with nerves close to the respiratory tract). Now we know that damage to eyes is also occurring.

More frightening though is that we now know that 30-40% of those inflicted with and surviving COVID will have notable permanent brain damage. Public information is available here: https://www.aarp.org/health….

Again, I implore readers of this blog to take the pandemic seriously, and to encourage others to take it seriously.  It has not gone away.  It isn’t finished.  It’s not merely like a bad cold.  It doesn’t only affect (dispensable?) old people.

This is not, as I’ve just previously said, a matter of liberalism or conservatism or Trumpism.  It is a public health issue, and a grave and potentially lethal one.  For your own sake, and for the sake of those around you, please take reasonable measures to stop it or at least to slow it down.  It’s not only even an issue of public health.  It’s a matter of charity, kindness, and personal responsibility.  Of love, if you will.