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It looks like were getting hit with another wave of COVID-19 cases.

Looking at the international totals for the virus since all this began in late 2019, a total of 4,154,327 people have died among a total case number of 193,533,900. Those numbers are from the Worldometer website that tracks these totals based on reports from official reporting agencies from countries all over the world, and those numbers are as of Friday morning.

A quick bit of work on my calculator tells me thats a death rate of about 2.15 percent among cases.

But lets think about this another way for a minute.

The population of all of rural West Tennessee gathered for some reason in Downtown Jackson. Thats between 600,000 and 700,000 people packed in to hear a concert or watch fireworks or something like that. Well say 700,000 just to keep the numbers simple.

Were having fun. Everyone is enjoying themselves. And theres more than half a million of us packed into a fairly small area.

But then one person with a gun climbs on top of the New Southern Hotel (I just say that because its the tallest building in the area). He points down into the people and begins shooting.

If the shooter is going to kill people at a rate of 2.15 percent, hes going to get 15,050 of us. But theres no way that would happen because the 700,000 on the ground would never let it get that far.

A lot of us would scatter to get away from the gunfire or run for cover inside a building. But I also know were in Tennessee with more than half a million Tennesseans gathered together, so that means theres probably a lot more than 15,000 people who would be at this gathering exercising their Second Amendment rights in our open carry state in addition to all of the highly trained law enforcement officers and military members who would be at the gathering too.

So among those running for cover and those with guns pointing back at the shooter, precautions would no doubt be taken to make sure this shooter had as little of an impact as possible on the people gathered in Downtown Jackson before he was taken out either with a bullet from the ground or from people climbing the stairs to the roof and dealing with him personally.

We can take our precautions to mitigate the impact COVID-19 has on our local population here, but unfortunately those precautions arent as simple as running for cover or as romanticized as shooting a bad guy.

But we can still mitigate it.

Im hoping we can still get out and gather this time around, but how about we stay away from each other? Ive gotten to where Im shaking hands again when I greet people, but Im thinking Im personally dialing it back to a respectful fist bump for hopefully just a couple or a few weeks.

And keep the hands washed and sanitized too.

And according to our local healthcare leaders, the vaccine is doing its job. There is a 5 percent breakthrough rate for COVID-19, which isnt much bigger than breakthrough rates for other vaccines. But with all vaccines, while the biggest hope is to not get the illness, the secondary hope is that if a vaccinated person gets the virus, its impact is decreased severely, meaning they might not have any symptoms, but if they do, the chances of them needing to be hospitalized are decreased dramatically.

If you havent been vaccinated, call a healthcare provider you trust (an actual healthcare provider and not a meme or video you saw on social media) to get informed and make your decision.

But if youre not comfortable with the vaccine, please take other precautions to slow the spread and mitigate the impact locally.

Thats us taking care of each other just like a lot of us would want to do by taking out a shooter firing at a crowd of us.

Brandon Shields is the editor of The Jackson Sun. Reach him at bjshields@jacksonsun.com or at 731-425-9751. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or on Instagram at editorbrandon.

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Let's take care of each other and mitigate COVID-19 | Opinion - The Jackson Sun