Wise words from Francis Collins

It's one of the great tragedies of this current moment that scientifically based public-health measures have somehow been captured as cultural or political phenomena. Your chance of spreading the coronavirus to a vulnerable person has nothing to do with what culture you come from or what political party you belong to. Your responsibility is to try and prevent that from happening to vulnerable people around you. But our country's polarization is so extreme that it even seems to extend to a place like this - where it absolutely doesn't belong. That is really troubling because it's putting people at risk who shouldn't be. 

The full interview is here and is well worth reading. Dr. Collins is the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, but his opinion is as relevant to residents of the United Kingdom. We cannot know when we meet a stranger in a public place whether they live with someone vulnerable and therefore need to distance, so we should always act on the assumption that they do. As Collins notes about growing resistance to mask-wearing: "The mask is not for you. That's for everybody around you. If you care about your neighbours, your family, the people you encounter in the store - wear that mask." If people are asymptomatic (as many appear to be), they have no awareness of their potential to infect those vulnerable to a cytokine storm but they are still potential vectors.