Letter to the Editor:

To the Carbon County Commissioners, particularly Commissioner Chris Lukasevich, concerning your request to know “where these specific cases of COVID-19 are taking place,” the Times News article dated April 3 cites you as requesting that information in order to protect first responders from a “viral hazard situation.”

I’m hoping that you are just uninformed. Because what you’re asking for could produce a very dangerous situation. First, EVERY medical certification class that is taught to first responders, including CPR, stresses that you need to protect yourself first. ALL first responders should be treating everyone as if they were COVID-19 positive. No exceptions! Masks, gloves and eye protection are mandatory. Again, no exceptions.

By requesting information as to location or names or addresses puts those patients at risk from retaliation, social shunning and possibly violence from some portions of society that remain ignorant to the disease process. We should have learned this during the late 1980s and early 1990s during the AIDs/HIV crisis.

I believe, at best, it is naive to think that if this information is obtained, that it would remain secret and in the hands of Emergency Management. After all, if you are trying to protect the first responders, would not the hundreds of them need to know also?

Commissioner, if you want to protect the first responders, make sure they have enough of the proper equipment, training and resources to fight this. It has been said that the hospitals are the front line of this battle. If that is the case, then the first responders are fighting from behind enemy lines. That analogy, Commissioner Lukasevich, I’m sure you are familiar with.

Stay safe, my first responder family, we are all in this together.

Mark T Walck, NREMTP, FP-C

Kunkletown