The COVID-19 pandemic is not slowing down in the United States, but continuing at a steady pace--increasing in some states and decreasing in others, just as it's doing in different towns and cities here in Massachusetts. The tug and pull of opposite viewpoints about the virus and the actions we're being asked, or required, to take to mitigate it also continue unabated, until we're all as exhausted by the emotional stress of condemnation and disagreement as we are by the pandemic and its effects.

Why do we have so much trouble accepting the reality of our situation?

There is an old story, which I'll reframe slightly to avoid being sexist and ableist. Call it "The Blindfolded Persons and the Elephant."

Six blindfolded persons were traveling and encountered an elephant, an animal they had never heard of or met before. Everyone was very startled and the elephant, not being blindfolded, hastily left the scene, leaving the blindfolded persons to argue over what they'd just run into.

The person who had run into the elephant's legs said it obviously had been several large logs standing on end. They'd been knocked over and rolled away. The person who had touched the elephant's trunk said no, no, it was an enormous snake. The person who had grabbed the elephant's tail said they were both wrong, it was just some old rope. The person who had been smacked in the face by the elephant's ear insisted that they'd been buzzed by a huge bat. They argued and argued about what they'd encountered. It didn't occur to them that all those different things could have been the same animal.

Our experience of COVID-19 is like that.

People who work in hospitals, hospices, and as first responders have seen the worst of the worst, and they see far more severe cases than milder ones. For them, COVID is a scourge that kills people horribly. And so it is, for the worst cases.

But 95 percent of those who test positive for COVID don't die, and about half don't even get sick. They, and people who know them personally, see COVID as a nasty disease, yes, but not worth putting the whole world into quarantine over.

But even more people than that don't know anyone who's even tested positive for COVID. In Massachusetts, 129,753 people have tested positive out of a population of 6,892,503. That's only 1.9 percent. Based on those numbers, the risk of being infected, and then infecting other people, doesn't seem very high. For people judging COVID this way, closing schools and shuttering restaurants, destroying small businesses and throwing people out of work, and requiring people to wear face masks, isolate themselves from others and risk losing their homes is a treatment much worse than the disease.

Our own Governor is so eager to get people back to some kind of normality, he's pressuring schools to reopen for classes and encouraging "low risk" communities to resume public activities and events.

And so, like the blindfolded persons, we're building our reality out of our own experiences, and when our personal experience contradicts what other people say, we "don't know what to believe."

I read a very interesting article this week that helps explain why COVID-19 is so confusing. It's in The Atlantic online magazine and it's called This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic.

It explains that COVID doesn't spread the same way as other illnesses like the flu. It spreads in clusters, and can be stopped by catching those clusters right away. This is why all of us have such different experiences of the same pandemic.

It also explains why other countries were able to stop COVID and how we can stop it here in the United States--and it boils down to the irksome but simple actions we're already doing--at least some of us. COVID needs people to be close together, sharing the same badly ventilated air, for an extended period of time, to spread. Wear face masks always, everywhere, all the time; avoid being in tight, close quarters with too many people; don't stay inside in one spot with the same people for too long, and we'll stop the virus from spreading.

If everyone knew somebody who had died on a ventilator, fighting to breathe, because of COVID, there would be no arguments about wearing masks. It's the arbitrary, luck-of-the-draw, lottery-ticket odds that make people doubt.

I'm very tired of having to "mask up" every time I leave home, and I miss all the activities, events and places that are cancelled or closed. I lead church services sometimes, and speaking while wearing a mask is not fun. But I accept that the only way we'll get the pandemic under control is by all of us pitching in and doing our part.

Inanna Arthen