ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

An anonymous parent called a local public school with a tip. The tipster knew a fellow parent who had tested positive for COVID-19. That parent planned to send her daughter to school the next day without telling anybody.

The information was sent up the flagpole to the principal, who made the appropriate calls to make sure the child of the infected parent didn’t show up at school. When I heard the story, I wondered, how often is this happening?

Apparently, much more than any of us know.

On Wednesday, the Post-Dispatch reported that a St. Charles County election supervisor died after having been infected with COVID-19. The supervisor got a positive test result before Election Day and had been told by a health care provider to quarantine, but went to the polling place at Blanchette Park Memorial Hall and worked the election without telling anybody.

What a completely avoidable misstep. At the very time that hospitalizations, cases and deaths are again spiking, in a county where mask-wearing is often seen as a burden, a person who carried a deadly virus brought it to a very public place and, likely, spread it among members of the community.

I pray no election workers or voters suffer the same fate as that poll worker.

Meantime, as some schools — in the Rockwood and Parkway districts — are reopening their doors, others are closing. Four schools in Jefferson County shut down this week because of the spread of COVID-19; ditto All Saints Academy in Florissant, and five schools in Macoupin County in the Metro East.

For parents, teachers, school administrators, health care workers, custodians and food-service employees, this opening and closing dance really complicates life. It means students head back home for online learning. It means stressed-out parents again do double duty as parents and teachers. And, of course, for those going home to quarantine it means concern for the health of their family members and anybody with whom they came into contact.

Or, we hope they are concerned.

As the election supervisor example demonstrates, there are still those among us who are not taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously. There was a time, not long ago, when some Republican conspiracy theorists — one of my grown children among them — suggested that come Nov. 4, the pandemic , a figment of the Democrats’ imagination used to attack President Donald Trump.

Now, as Trump’s time in the White House could be nearing its end, COVID-19 is finding its second wind. Or maybe it’s still riding the wave of the first wind, because too many people in too many parts of America didn’t listen to scientists begging us to heed their warnings.

The pandemic is still with us, and it’s going to keep getting worse as long as some members of our society believe it is OK to spread it uncontrollably with little or no regard for their neighbors. The election is over — mostly — but the pandemic will be with us for a long time. Is it too much to ask that we get over our red and blue divides long enough to save a few lives and care about those who have died?

On Election Day, I wrote about the 13-year-old boy in Franklin County who had died of COVID-19, the first Missouri death of a child related to the coronavirus pandemic. A self-described Republican emailed me and asked why I didn’t blame the child for his own death, because he was, apparently, overweight.

I was stunned by the man’s lack of humanity. A child was dead. A worldwide pandemic was the cause, but let’s blame the kid?

It’s madness. So is going to a voting precinct with COVID-19 and not telling anybody, or sending your kid to school when the virus has invaded your home.

Surely, a divided America can agree on that. Can’t we?