Was it really only two weeks ago that we in New Hampshire reluctantly heeded our public health experts’ advice and started to stay home? How was it that we were thinking that we could wash our hands, sequester ourselves, take walks six feet apart, blow air kisses to those we care about, and that by the end of March we would be back to life as usual?

Our intrepid president told us as much, until he moved his arbitrary back-to-work date forward a few weeks.

It’s hard to believe that was a little more than a week ago. At that press briefing, he breathed his prediction that we would soon be rid of the worst of the “China virus” soon; in fact the greatest economy the world had ever seen would be back in business “by Easter.” The “s” in “Easter” was like a hiss when he said it, and it was impossible to escape his twisted intentions of choosing this particular holiday for this pronouncement.

Just in the last day or so the president has been forced to walk his predictions forward even more, but many of us have had a crash course in epidemiology meanwhile. We are hungry for news, but know full well we won’t hear it from his mouth.

We search for news from trustworthy sources. We listen to Anthony Fauci when he is interviewed away from the White House. We look to the Centers for Disease Control and our nation’s schools of public health for voices of authority. We listen carefully to public radio, read the paper, including our own Concord Monitor, and avoid news sources that are little more than instruments at the president’s disposal to fan his narcissism and please his base.

How did we get to this point, when some of our leaders have only their personal interests at heart, and we the people are so divided that we can’t even talk to each other, much less come to grips with the situation we are all in together?

If there is a single lesson in this whole terrible ordeal, it is that our mutual enemy is a tiny blob of RNA that has no respect for party, gender, race, religion or national origin. We are one global people. We all suffer more if we pit ourselves against each other.

We need to do everything we can to stay healthy so our doctors and nurses on the front line can do their job and care for those of us who do get sick.

We have had to revise our thinking on so much: that people without symptoms can still spread the disease, that the virus can lurk on doorknobs and surfaces, that the simple act of touching our face can make us sick.

We have had the blind assumption that medical personnel and equipment would be ready and waiting to help us when we needed it, but we now know how far that is from the truth. As we have seen, the virus does not care who we are or how deserving we think we are. What we saw in China in January, in Korea in February, and in Europe in March, we now see exploding in the United States. It is has begun inserting its equal opportunity fingers into our own community.

We have only to look at New York to see where we’re headed, short of testing, personal protective equipment and ventilators. We need to stay well!

It is ever so hard to avoid worrying: for our health care providers, for our newly unemployed, for the vulnerable in our community without a safety net. We need to all work together to part of the solution, not the problem.

The solution has many facets. Our essential workers need to do just that: work. The rest of us need to find new ways of supporting each other from home, checking in with friends and family virtually, or volunteering in our community.

We need to seek out organizations helping in our community and support our local businesses to the extent we can. All of these bind us together – and yes, we are one family! There is so much to do, even from home.

(Millie LaFontaine of Concord is a retired neurologist.)