This week’s column contains an urgent message that some will question or even find disagreeable, but please know that it is presented with only the best intentions for all. It applies not only to people in Norwich, but to those in every community everywhere whose health is jeopardized by the ongoing COVID pandemic.

Even at the advanced age of 67, I have long carried a sense of physical invulnerability. With the exception of pneumonia more than 50 years ago, high blood pressure that is managed with medication, and open-heart surgery six years ago to address a life-threatening aneurysm on my aorta, I have been blessed with good health.

When the pandemic first struck two years ago, I tried to address it with common sense, getting both Pfizer vaccines and the subsequent booster — all in 2021 while living in Florida. The application of both vaccines took place in a community center in nearby Fort Pierce, and when I arrived the morning of my appointment and saw the parking lot full of hundreds of vehicles, I was resigned to having to spend most of the day there. To my astonishment, the set-up was probably the best-coordinated government operation I have ever seen, using cooperative services from municipal, county and state health and public safety departments. There were people there to help you with everything from a parking place to filling out paperwork to directing us where to stand in line.

From start to finish, my first visit took 45 minutes, including filling out paperwork and the 15 minutes you’re required to stay after receiving the vaccine. My second visit had me in and out of the community center in 30 minutes, again including the 15-minute post-injection wait.

Not only were the staff and volunteers helpful, but they were cheerful and had everything covered right down to the last detail. They even had upbeat music piped into the community center’s gymnasium where we received our vaccines. It was a marvel of planning, coordination and cooperation.

When booster shots became available last fall, I received it and my annual flu shot at Walmart in Port St. Lucie, which also did a great job of having me in and out in less than a half-hour, including time spent filling out paperwork.

Before, during and after the vaccine, I also wore a mask and practiced reasonable social distancing when the situation called for it.

Like most people, I have taken practical, though not extreme, steps to protect myself and those I come into contact with. I know two people — both younger than me and with loving families — who almost died from COVID, both of them on life-supporting respirators in hospital intensive care units, where their prognoses were touch-and-go for a while. Thankfully, both survived, but that convinced me of how serious we should all be taking this virus.

It has, after all, killed millions worldwide, including more than 800,000 here in the United States.

Despite all the precautions in the past nine months, I began to develop cold-like symptoms the day after Christmas — runny nose, sneezing and coughing. By the time I embarked on my annual drive at 5 a.m. the next day to spend the winter and spring in Florida, I was taking a direct hit from whatever this was: aches, fatigue, congestion, fever, coughing, sneezing and a sore throat. After arriving in Florida on Tuesday afternoon, I purchased an at-home COVID test, which produced a positive reading and confirmed my worst fear — that I had COVID.

At the direction of the Centers for Disease Control, I spent the next five days in home quarantine, subsisting mostly on vitamins and medications that would normally do away with these symptoms. They helped, but not nearly as much as they normally would. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

After five days — reduced only a week earlier from a 10-day isolation period — I was allowed to leave home, but only with a mask.

Yes, I hate wearing a mask, too, but I am normally a rule-follower, and take advice I receive from a well-meaning government at face value. We need to remember this is largely uncharted territory for our government, our healthcare professionals, our drug companies, the news media and anyone else who weighs in on the subject.

Anyone who tries to convince you that their information is definitely 100 percent accurate is exaggerating at best and lying at worst.

Nevertheless, I strongly encourage everyone to get vaccinated and to receive the booster shot. Don’t take my word for it; don’t even take government’s word for it or the news media’s. Talk to the best authority — your physician — and follow his/her advice. They will likely tell you that the vaccine is not government’s way to inject a tracking chip into your body or to abuse its authority or any of the other silly arguments we’ve all heard from contrarians.

No, as I have learned, the vaccines and boosters don’t prevent us from contracting COVID, but they do lessen the impact in most cases. It’s possible that without the vaccines and boosters that COVID could have killed me. Hey, I just retired 1 1/2 years ago; I’ve got a loving partner, kids and grandkids that I want to spend time with, and lots of golf to play, though admittedly, not very well. I want to read more books and walk on the beach and lose some weight and see who wins the Super Bowl and World Series, not just this year, but for years and years to come.

Unless it is for religious or health reasons, it’s hard to understand those who refuse to get vaccinated, especially when it not only costs them their jobs, but worse, puts them and those closest to them at greater risk.

They may huff and puff and assert that no one’s going to tell them what to do, especially the government ... which makes me wonder what happens when they come upon a traffic light, an activated railroad crossing or an electrified fence.

If you’re tired of COVID and having it thrust in your face by every form of media, do something to help get us past it. If you’re sick of having to wear a mask, standing six feet behind the person in front of you in line, or not being able to come and go as you please; of participating in computer-screen meetings instead of face-to-face, of having your children try to learn remotely instead of in a classroom, if you don’t want to hear anymore from Anthony Fauci about whether you can celebrate holidays with your friends and families, do something logical about it.

The best way for us to contain COVID and get it behind us once and for all is to use every means at our disposal to protect ourselves from it.

We are at war with COVID, an enemy that has not only changed the way we live day-to-day but changed our way of life, canceling graduations and proms, sporting and cultural events, weddings, wakes and funerals, travel, education, healthcare, our social lives — everything! If we approach it as an enemy and fight it the same way, each of us doing our part, then we can overcome this enemy. Let’s do that. Let’s all fight on the same side and win this war!

Bill Stanley, a former vice president at L+M Hospital, grew up in Norwich.