Dr. Dave Higgins, a pediatrician at Billings Clinic, also recognized the difficulty of following the guidelines.

“These things that are being asked, they’re hard,” he said. “Each person may have a harder time doing some of these things than others. And, we’re tired of doing this. We’re fatigued. But they’re so critical at this time.”

Higgins stressed the goal of this advice to social distance, mask up and more is to keep life going, not to shut it down.

“We want to keep kids in school, to keep people at work,” he said. “We want people to have the freedom to do all those things safely. To get there, we hope people will rally around this shared common goal.”

For those in the community who may not realize the severity of the surge, Higgins implored them to listen to the stories of people whose lives have been “torn apart and