Donna Carlson, meet Debbie Holmes

COVID survivor and newly-minted COVID expert (remember all those recovered addicts who told you not to drink alcohol at school assemblies?)

Donna Carlson, COVID+ Estes Park Chamber of Commerce president and survivor, has now self-appointed herself Estes Park's public health expert, wresting the role from Debbie "Don't Stay At" Holmes, who may not be willingly conceding, it's just she's gone back to writing harmlessly recycled "turkey makes you sleepy, no, Thanksgiving makes you sleepy" columns.

Donna has now decided restaurants don't give you COVID, in fact, restaurants are protective, and prevent you from getting COVID.  She contracted COVID from drinking wine with a friend (that scene setter by itself pregnant with possibilities), in her home, so, apparently, you get it from your house.  Or from Donna Carlson's house.  If only restaurants were open, so that you could get out of your infectious house and sit and drink wine with a friend without masks and not get COVID.

Um, message to Donna - One of the reasons COVID is spreading rampantly right now is because more people have it in Estes Park currently than had it this summer.  And let's take any reputable study (rather than your own single, silly, jaded experiment), say, a recent study from England, which said the MAJORITY of cases came from shopping in supermarkets.  NOT from drinking wine with your friend in your house.  So, while you claim, Donna, that you can't get COVID from theaters or restaurants, the smarter set realizes that, the more COVID+ folks you pack into a room or a stadium or an enclosed space with no outside air circulation, and the longer you keep them there, the more likelihood transmission will occur from infected bodies to uninfected bodies.  Like from your friend to you, apparently.  You didn't provide more details.  Maybe it came from the wine.  Were you drinking Wuhan Malbec?  Or Soccer Stadium Boone's Farm?

That's not just science, which can be dismissed by those who were too busy drinking wine with friends in high school to understand, it's common sense.  Yes, Donna, you were hired to relentlessly promote businesses, but that doesn't give you the platform to relentlessly abuse the English language or attack those whose immune systems aren't as strong as yours, perhaps because of age, or perhaps because they didn't grow up eating clay and sleeping in gutters.

"Come to Estes, live your life" seems to be the new battle cry among the "We've caught COVID, and it's no big deal" set.  Note that the 75 people in Larimer County who died from COVID since March can't dispute this claim, because they don't have air to run through their vocal cords.  

If you take some residents' lives in the bargain, well, so be it.  Through blind luck or the immunological benefits of being exposed to multiple partners or having earned scads of money and gaining power and thus special treatment through questionable means, Donna C. and Donald T. both survived being stupid - Why can't you, nursing home residents and cancer survivors and folks with Type I diabetes, why can't you all just live like them, take your medicine, and do the same?