The COVID-19 situation varies by town, state and country but, here in Fountain Hills, it looks like the majority of residents were keen to get the vaccination as soon as possible.

If you’ll check our reporting on page 1A of this week’s paper, you’ll see that nearly 70 percent of residents over the age of 18 have had at least one vaccine injection. Even more impressive is the fact that a whopping 92 percent of those over the age of 65 fall into that same category.

In that story, Mayor Ginny Dickey heaps praise on community members for taking the pandemic and vaccinations seriously, a sentiment The Times would like to echo. The vast majority of health professionals the world over believe the vaccination is the best and fastest way to curb the spread of COVID-19 and its growing list of increasingly dangerous variants, and a sound majority of Fountain Hills residents took those recommendations to heart. More importantly, they took the safety of themselves and those around them seriously, which probably helps explain why the impact in our community has not been as devastating as elsewhere.

Given what we’re seeing across the country and elsewhere in the world, there’s no telling when we’ll truly be able to put this pandemic behind us. Here’s hoping that more communities will start racking up vaccination numbers like Fountain Hills, and that our own town’s vaccination statistics will continue to grow.