With winter coming, COVID-19 is surging. We can’t afford to get this wrong.

Half a year into Alaska’s COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all gotten good at knowing what we should be doing to stop it. We’ve also gotten good at convincing ourselves that we’re doing enough to keep everyone safe.

The case counts tell a different story. And the case counts don’t lie.

“Nothing is going to replace individuals taking action on their own to protect themselves, their loved ones and their neighbors,” Gov. Mike Dunleavy said in a Facebook video explaining the need for maintaining health measures. “And this includes wearing a mask when you’re in a setting with others. Avoiding contact with others outside of your family if you don’t need to make that contact.”

But as the old adage goes, actions speak louder than words. And just hours after speaking those words, the governor was filmed at a political fundraiser in a private home on the Anchorage Hillside, mask off, surrounded by others who were similarly unmasked. And a few days prior, at another political fundraiser on the Kenai Peninsula, candidates and supporters mugged for photos, standing next to one another in a crowded room. Of about 50 people whose faces were visible in a photo of the event, only one was wearing a mask.

It isn’t just Alaska politicians who say one thing and do another when it comes to COVID-19. If we’re honest, the vast majority of us don’t abide by public health guidelines all the time, even if we convince ourselves that isolated lapses aren’t a big deal. But those lapses stack up, and probability catches up with us. With a string of more than a dozen days in a row with 100 or more new cases — and, more alarmingly, a statewide test positivity rate that’s more than twice that of a few months ago — it’s catching up now.

The consequences of our failure to abide by health measures long enough to control the virus is most easily measured in escalating case counts and deaths. But there are other metrics, harder to quantify, that are also a consequence of the disease’s poorly mitigated spread: Children’s education suffering for want of in-person classes. Businesses limping along on the knife’s edge between scraping by and permanent closure. Elevated stress among residents who aren’t sure about their prospects for employment, their ability to make rent next month or whether they can pay for treatment if they contract COVID-19.

After half a year living amidst the pandemic, we know what works to control the virus: Wearing masks in public. No close social contact, especially indoors, with people not in your household “bubble." Strict hand-washing. Maintaining at least six feet of distance from others, especially if you or they are unmasked. These health practices are mostly the same in Alaska as they are in New Zealand, where residents have twice stopped community spread entirely in a nation of 5 million people, and where they have now resumed almost all normal activity by strictly adhering to social distancing protocols, with their economy and public health largely unscathed.

The difference? In New Zealand, those health practices have not become politicized. When it became clear masks worked to limit spread of the disease, New Zealanders donned them without delay. There was no widespread talk of the need to “save” the country from health mandates, because it was clear those mandates were the fastest path to resuming normal activity.

It’s tempting for us to believe that abiding by health measures is unnecessary because of our youth, fitness or the disease’s low mortality rate. But this is precisely why COVID-19 continues to spread and Alaskans continue to die from it. Instead of thinking that we will likely survive our own brush with the disease, we should think about how we would explain to friends, family members and coworkers that we might have exposed them — and endangered their lives, not just our own — if we test positive. We should behave as if we have the disease and are trying to protect others, because for many of us, this could be true.

We’re approaching a critical juncture in our battle with COVID-19. In a matter of a few weeks, we’ll all be confined indoors for the vast majority of the next several months. If we’re still only paying lip service to the best practices for fighting this disease, case counts will continue to rise, we won’t be able to resume anything resembling “normal” life, and many more Alaskans will die. If we throw up our hands and declare that the virus will spread no matter what we do, we’re guaranteed the worst-case scenario. In his message to Alaskans, the governor was spot-on when he said of the pandemic: “It doesn’t mean we should be scared. It doesn’t mean we should be terrified.” That is true talk — if we commit to walk the walk. Our only realistic course for defeating COVID-19 is playing by the rules. New Zealand has done it. We can do it. It only requires that we practice what we preach.