The newness of quarantine is beginning to wear off, and it’s beginning to feel truly like the “new normal” everyone has been calling for the past few weeks.

We continue to fare pretty well as a community here in Barton County, with a low number of confirmed cases, and without the daily increases larger communities throughout the country have experienced.  It would be so easy now to drift into complacency, so we need to make an extra effort to remain vigilant and not relax this effort at the present time.  It is this social distancing effort that is keeping most of us safe right now.

But, it can’t last forever. Humans were made to be in community, and most of us thrive on closer contact.  Now that we understand how to social distance, it’s time to consider what’s next.

Contact tracing will be the next focus on this war against COVID-19, according to public health experts, and it’s getting a lot of attention this week in the mainstream media. Short of demanding everyone shelter in place with none of the exceptions we currently allow (grocery shopping being the top exception), ramping up these efforts is beginning to look like the only way to bring us back into closer contact with one another anytime soon.

We need to figure out how to do that with the leadership we have in place right now and with the resources at our disposal.  The time for Monday morning quarterbacking will come, but not today.

We have a lot of very smart and capable people who could be trained to fill the manpower gap for our health departments if funding were available.  And there are equally talented money managers  with the expertise to link funds with talent.  We have talented STEM workers designing technology to assist in the effort too.  With enough focus and time, we will create a 2020 solution for this problem.

The question that remains is this.  Will we as a group be willing to follow through on ensuring the solution will work?  Because the very nature of contact tracing asks us to give something up.  Our privacy.  We need to be willing to share who we’re coming in contact with, either to an individual or an app.  And for the effort to be truly effective, we have to be willing to allow 100 percent transparency.

Everywhere we go, everyone we meet, whatever time of day or night, we need to be willing to let it be known somehow.  And then, we need to be willing to follow through on recommendations or comply with orders if we’re informed we have been exposed and need to quarantine.  That, in and of itself, could raise uncomfortable questions.

Some will bristle at the thought of what they perceive as invasion of privacy, and others will scoff and point out there is no such thing as privacy in this day and age with all the technology we’ve already accepted into our daily lives.

During this time of isolation, and especially on this day when so many of us are missing communion with one another, consider what community means for you, and what you are willing to sacrifice in order to achieve it.

Veronica Coons