Until about two weeks ago, the picture of Kennett Square painted by the county health department’s maps was astonishingly good. As the county numbers climbed, our borough consistently reported only two infections and no deaths. This didn’t make sense to me, given the density of our population and the number of residents who work close together in the local mushroom houses. Last week, the numbers jumped shockingly, to the 30s, then the 40s, then the 50s. At the very moment when Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf began easing some restrictions in our region, the number of infections in the borough has jumped, as of yesterday, to 65—more than 30 times what it was at the beginning of May.

I was startled enough to start calling around. “It’s really alarming,” said Whitney Hoffman, the vice chair of the local board of supervisors, who has been posting COVID-19 data on a community website that attracts a tiny fraction of the audience a good local-news operation would, whether in print or online. “We aren’t sure what’s really causing it, but I’m concerned that one reason might be that people are relaxing their social distancing. I walk in Nixon Park and I see all kinds of people without masks, some of them eating at picnic tables that are roped off because we are unable to disinfect them regularly. Bad idea.”