“How Latter-day Saint Charities is helping during coronavirus crisis — in Utah and around the world”

This is a really juicy one for your Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File.  Isn’t it regrettable that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built up a substantial rainy-day fund during those sunny days before the epidemiological and economic rains began to fall?  Don’t we wish that it hadn’t?  Our indignation should be intense and unceasing!  Even when we’re standing in the unemployment and food lines.

“How Latter-day Saint Charities is helping during coronavirus crisis — in Utah and around the world”

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I sincerely, deeply, hope that you’re practicing the recommended “social distancing,” not merely for your own health but for the health of those around you and for the sake of the healthcare workers who are bearing the burdens of service on the very front lines of the battle against the coronavirus.

To gain some idea of the burden that COVID-19 is imposing on healthcare workers — and that we have absolutely no right to make worse through irresponsible behavior — I encourage you to go, if you can, to the Facebook page of “One Vaxxed Nurse” and scroll down to the entry for 5:20 PM on 20 March that begins “Tonight is the last night that I’ll hug my kids goodnight or kiss my husband until god knows when.”

And don’t forget to wash your hands!  Carefully!  At length!

Please watch this remarkable video (Seeing Germs), which was extremely well done by a graduate of Brigham Young University:

“BYU grad’s science video shows just how easily germs spread”

It’s exceptionally well-suited for showing to children.  They’ll get the point.  But most adults also need to get the point.

Let’s break the back of this contagion.  Let’s not permit it to drag on and to take an even more enormous toll on our economy and social and mental health than it already has.  Let’s stop it in its tracks, as quickly and decisively as we can.

I’m proud, on the whole, of the Utah response to COVID-19, and I’m pleased that, unless I’m mistaken, one of the readers of and commenters on this blog has been a central figure in designing it.  Here’s an important part of the overall response:

“Herbert maps out coronavirus response plan touted as most comprehensive in nation”

The sixteen-page document can be found embedded in the article above, as well as here:

“Resources for Business”

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Again, we end on a positive note:

“Ardent Mills donates enough flour to keep Schmidt’s bread giveaway going for weeks: The Ogden plant sent 2,500 pounds of flour to the Salt Lake County bakeries for their daily bread giveaway”