Maybe the thing is to think of all the coronavirus dead in some sort of local fashion

We’ve heard from health officials and frontline caregivers who are flummoxed by the many folks who deny the existence of coronavirus and/or refuse to take just the most basic preventative actions.

We wonder if personalizing the pandemic is the key. With that, forgive us for being a bit grim:

According to tracking on the state website covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/: As of Thursday the state had 1,059,267 confirmed cases of COVID-19. And the state had 18,466 deaths. In all the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, covid. cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker, as of Thursday there were 11.4 million total cases and 249,670 deaths.

It’s that number … it seems high, but it also seems remote. It’s spread out over the entire country, urban and rural areas combined, so it’s easy to hide from it.

But If you think of that number applied locally, you might feel that the situation is more urgent. You could think of it like this: The number of dead in the United States because of coronavirus is equal to the combined populations of Sutter, Colusa, Yuba and Glenn counties ... plus another 25,000.

Gone.

In just Yuba-sutter there were 23 dead as of Thursday morning. We don’t know the identity of the dead, but if you’ve been here long enough, you probably know at least one family that’s suffered from a death.

Some might try to minimize the impact by noting that most of the dead had some underlying conditions or that the rate really isn’t that high in the grand scheme of things … Sorry, but the virus is real, it’s really here, and it’s really killing people at a high rate. News that drug companies are having good luck with efficacy tests for potential vaccines is all good ... but it’s still months away from there being local availability and really isn’t a good reason for flouting the safety protocols.

We don’t like what the governor is doing -- the tier system is flawed and the curfew order seems silly.

But what doesn’t sound silly to us, in the least, is the idea that we all bear responsibility for what happens to us and our economy. Wearing a mask is so simple, how is it not as common as putting on shoes to go out?