The word hero is tossed around a lot in these turbulent times. Heroes are people we admire, or should admire. We think they’re brave and do great, glamorous things.

Maybe it’s time to recognize a whole new group of heroes. They’re heroes of an everyday kind. They’re people who have the courage to carry on even though the news is bad.

They’re the people who set an example we want to follow. That’s because by following their example we feel better about ourselves.

They’re people who do the right thing even when those getting all the attention are the ones who are not. They’re the people who make our society function because they don’t beg for attention, but, rather, because they carry on without it.

They’re the majority in our world. Most likely, you’re one of those heroes. Here’s just one reason why I think so.

Most of you, and a whole lot of people like you, live all over this country and around the globe. You have made it more than seven months into this pandemic without getting infected with the novel coronavirus.

You have accomplished that considerable feat by doing things that are far from glamorous. You’ve kept your distance, worn a face mask when it made sense and one was available, washed your hands when you could and sanitized as called for.

You’ve made more phone calls and fewer in-person visits to family, friends and acquaintances. You’ve skipped meetings and reunions you ached to attend. You’ve shopped when you needed to, perhaps gone to the doctor or the dentist, visited with the neighbors, yet done all these things less and more cautiously than before.

Do you realize what this means? It means you haven’t spread the virus to someone for whom it could be a death sentence. It means you haven’t infected a mail carrier or a store clerk or an aging acquaintance or relative.

It means you haven’t used, or caused to be used, a hospital bed that might have been needed by someone else. It means you haven’t used, or caused to be used, scarce testing supplies or capacity. It means you haven’t used or contaminated masks and gowns and other critical protective equipment.

It means you haven’t added more stress to the life of already work-stressed health care workers. Over 2,000 of those critical workers, by the way, have been infected by the virus, according to data from Idaho’s public health districts.

Yes, we all expected to be in a far different place by the end of this summer. The lockdown in March was supposed to allow time to get the virus under control. All it did for as long as it lasted was slow the spread.

We didn’t have the equipment, supplies or trained individuals to do the testing we needed. We didn’t have enough tests and we didn’t understand which were the right tests. As medical scientists are explaining now, we needed results in minutes, hours at most, not three to 10 days or more.

To stop the spread of the virus we should have used crude but rapid detection tests. Instead, we’ve relied on accurate but slow, and expensive, diagnostic tests. Only with speedy detection is tracing and isolation effective. Why we are just now figuring that out is beyond me.

Why we have no coordinated nationwide effort to get the right tests in the hands of the right people to attack virus hot-spots in every state is also beyond me. Our current whack-a-mole approach has things getting better in some spots and breaking out all over again in others. We don’t seem to be able to do better consistently.

I don’t know why.

What I do know is that if, thus far in this pandemic, you still haven’t been infected with the coronavirus that’s raging, then you’re a hero. Give yourself credit for doing something great!

Dave Finkelnburg is a long-time Idahoan, a former newspaper journalist, and is currently semi-retired from an engineering career.