I implore the town councils, county commissioners and Colorado governor to rescind the countywide and statewide lockdowns and allow, even encourage, low-risk COVID-19 people to return to work, open businesses and give our local and regional economies a fighting chance to resuscitate and not languish indefinitely in the current emotional and financial downward spiral. Surely, there must be a way to protect the high-risk group while not sacrificing our constitutional freedoms in the process. We must certainly protect the 3%, but a quarantine on the 97% is misguided over-reach.

According to experts, the low-risk demographics, which include most of Colorado’s population, would recover quickly or not show any symptoms after contracting the virus. The relatively small high-risk group (those older than 70 with underlying conditions like heart or lung ailments) should be excluded from the general population with all due precautions.

But the youthful majority should be allowed to return to work so that at some point 40% to 70% of that population will become naturally immune.

This herd immunity theory says that people who become naturally immune to the virus by contracting and surviving it will block the virus from infecting others in the high-risk group, thereby saving many more lives in the long run until our medical experts create a vaccine for the entire population.

Policy makers erring on the side of caution in order to avoid mass fatalities is the right humanitarian approach, but the numbers don’t warrant having the economic medicine kill the constitutional patient. Yes, we must save as many lives as possible, but we cannot allow open-ended government solutions to remove our individual liberty permanently in the process.

So, I ask our leaders: Please lift the lockdown stay-at-home orders and let us go back to work and help beat this virus the natural way.