To the editor:

Thank you Ledger-Transcript for being a community resource for Covid-19 virus information – open to non-subscribers on your website as well as covering important regional news about the virus in the paper.

The lesson heard from Italy, among the hardest hit by the virus, is that if they had started their preventative measures 10 days earlier they would not have become one of the most impacted. That’s their assessment given hindsight.

Which means these are critical days in the US. In our home town communities.

How to get that word out?

We avoid contact with others for our own health, but we do it for the community as well. In small towns we know so many people. Imagine friends, neighbors, fellow committee or church members stricken by the virus. And family of course. That should be motivation enough.

Also, we all know people in the medical profession. For their sakes, too.

Contact with our children and grandchildren in the area, who we gather with often, is now by smart phones. Lots of texting. I’m learning to insert emojis in the texts with some creativity.

Our daughter shops for us, going into a store once a week to minimize her exposure.

We walked this morning for exercise and social contact. Six feet apart. We don’t go into her house; nor she ours.

Until there is testing readily available, we don’t know if we are carriers or other people are.

The more seriously we take how easy the virus spreads, the quicker we will get through it – with fewer deaths. Compared to Italy and China, we are behind in the ability to test for the virus. All the more reason to do what the CDC, our town, and our local hospital is telling us to do.

Francie Von Mertens

Peterborough

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