Go crazy! Whoop it up! Join in raucous merrymaking! That’s the directive the idiom “Paint the town red!” encourages.

But on November 12, Newtown was painted red — on the state COVID-19 data map. And that’s no cause for celebration. It means a town has an average daily COVID-19 case rate over the last two weeks of greater than 15 per 100,000 population. So Newtown residents joined the 80 percent of citizens statewide in the red zone last week.

The pandemic that has again overwhelmed our country — the world, for that matter — has had us counting up losses every week.

We count hospitalizations, positive test numbers, attributed deaths, the number of towns in our state with steadily increasing COVID-19 numbers, and states we can and cannot visit without adherence to quarantine protocols and testing.

We count increasing numbers of households that make use of our town food pantry, that have contacted Social Services for help with holiday meals and gifts. We see this need grow due to people losing jobs, leaving jobs to care for children, or having hours cut.

How we moved from the subdued gray color on the map to a rapid change to orange and then red is frustrating. Did we let COVID fatigue get the better of us? Did we too rapidly expand our “quaranteams?” Was social distancing a distant memory for too many?

The hows and whys of it do not really matter at this point. We are a town painted red, and only by voluntarily returning to more restrictive protocols — more take out, less eating in; more curbside shopping; adherence to mask wearing in public (there is the potential for racking up a $500 fine for ignoring this directive); wearing a mask in social gatherings, family or otherwise, and keeping those gatherings small; less social gathering, period; and committing to making the upcoming holidays ones that favor safety over tradition — will we see our COVID numbers return to the gentle gray of so many weeks ago.

Dr Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, told Governor Lamont and listeners during a recent governor’s news briefing that Connecticut and the nation are in for a tough couple of months, with the peak of the epidemic forecasted for late January or February.

But he also offered rays of hope: better therapies, increased knowledge about the novel coronavirus, and effective vaccines on the horizon could bring us to the downside of the epidemic by spring.

We must, as our governor has observed, “buckle down” these coming weeks. Though we turn our eyes to spring, winter has not yet set in. Cooperation and dedication from every citizen can truly be a matter of life or death as the wily virus wends its way through the population.

Let’s pull together. Let’s leave the politics of this public health crisis behind. Only when we move Newtown to the least colorful on the data map can we look to the day when we can wholeheartedly “Paint the town red!”