I could be your sister, mother, friend, wife, neighbor, or stranger. As I stand on the beach, I look absolutely healthy. You’d never know my heart and lungs are fragile and my immune system compromised. Multitudes of people who look equally healthy are also at grave risk from the coronavirus. We live, work, play, party, and volunteer among you. If we are going to survive the coronavirus, we need everyone to take it seriously.

The coronavirus doesn’t care about party affiliations or Presidential preferences. It doesn’t honor national or state borders. It latches onto hosts regardless of wealth, age, gender, or race. Even if it doesn’t make you ill or kill you, it let’s you carry to others like a bee carries pollen from one flower to another. It doesn’t care whether you take it seriously, think it’s ordinary, or consider it a hoax. It’s coming to your neighborhood no matter who you are and what you think of it. Take it seriously. Now.

Our communities need us to be responsible, thoughtful, and kind. This is not the time to try put others at risk by flouting medical and scientific precautions, even if you currently think they’re overblown. Within a mere two weeks of the first two deaths here, the coronavirus went from being invisible in my small community outside Seattle to killing 40 people in their 50’s – 90’s. Scientific modelling shows why we need to change our behavior. The White House, Congress, state governments, and other nations took important actions in recent days. Now it’s time for each of us to do our part.

Here’s some of what we can do.

• Stay home–stores, bars, restaurants, offices. Don’t even go to private parties with friends. I know that sounds draconian but we can pass along the coronavirus for two weeks before we even have symptoms. Each person we infect will unwittingly infect others. Recognize our responsibility to others beyond ourselves and act accordingly.
• “Think of yourself as one transmission away from being in the same room with someone who is high risk,” says Dr. Steven Pergam, infectious disease specialist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Consider ourselves part of a mass community shield for the elderly and others who may have less ability to fight off the virus.
• Check on elderly neighbors and family. If they’re wise, they’re already in self-quarantine. They’d love phone contact with outside people, particularly friends and family. If you’re not an at-risk person (I am), offer to shop for them, pick up prescriptions, or get their mail. If they accept, leave what you get them at the door so you don’t inadvertently carry the coronavirus inside their home.
• Don’t hoard toilet paper, hand sanitizer, or food. Buy what we will reasonably use in 14 days and leave the rest for others. Remember, we’re in this together.
• Be kind. Tell the people in our life that we appreciate them–co-workers, clerks, employees. Tell our family and friends often that we love them. This is a time to remember that we “do not know what the day will bring forth” and that some of the people we care about may not be accessible to us very soon. Stay in touch. Many parts of life have been cancelled. Love has not.
• Pay particular attention to the people and world around us: notice clouds, trees, spring flowers, smile lines, the flavors of a meal, a small hand in ours, laughter across a board game, raindrops running down a window. Use this crisis to notice how precious and extraordinary life is.

Every human being is connected to the human race from before our birth. Our belly buttons remind us that we did not come into this world on our own. We are part of a larger community that is both gift and responsibility. We honor or desecrate that holy connection by our choices in this crisis either honor or desecrate that sacred relationship. Please choose prayerfully and wisely. All of us are depending it.