Storm clouds are gathering. Whose forecast do you trust?

I’m writing this as the last drops of a big summer thunderstorm fall from the sky -- the third in less than 24 hours. Thousands of my neighbors have lost power and woken up in the dark.

I knew the severe weather was coming long before it got here.

How did I know? The weather radar app on my phone showed me. So did the pop-up alert from the local TV station. And the text from a neighboring county’s government. And the Facebook post from my city. And the Instagram post from the National Weather Service.

When we get alerts like this, especially the kind that say “Severe Thunderstorm Warning” because a powerful storm is headed our way, we take them seriously. We don’t head out on a long walk, start a round of golf or send the kids out to play in a big field.

If we have to go out, we take a car or truck, not a bicycle or a motorcycle. We pack an umbrella or a raincoat. We try to get indoors or get home before the big storm is supposed to hit. We pull over if the rain floods the road.

We know by now that even though no weather forecast is perfect, we trust the professionals whose job it is to monitor the weather conditions, to make forecasts and put out warnings. They’ve got special training and equipment.

We pay for much of that through our tax dollars, because our society values advance knowledge that can prevent injury, death and property damage. Or just ruined walks and golf games.

Sure, without all that expertise and technology, I might have suspected a storm was coming because my right knee was aching yesterday. And once the storm was a few miles away I could have heard the thunder or seen the dark clouds.

But I wouldn’t have known how bad, how big, how intense and how damaging the storms might be. And as the storms raged, I wouldn’t have a real-time map of power outages, showing me just how close my neighborhood came to losing electricity, so I could prepare in case we lost it too.

The past 24 hours have reminded me a lot of what’s going on with COVID-19.

If we’re paying attention, we can see the storm that’s raging across the Southern U.S. They’re living through a horrific surge of illness caused by a new strain of the coronavirus. It's fed by a low rate of adult and teen vaccination, no vaccine for kids under 12, and a lack of masking in schools and public places.

Hospitals are filling -- including children’s hospitals -- and it’s getting worse by the day.

They’re scrambling for cover like people caught out in a wide-open field in a thunderstorm, frantically imposing new mask and vaccine requirements, and calling out for health workers from other states to come help them.

It’s like when there’s a Category 4 hurricane about to hit the Gulf Coast or Florida. We up here in Michigan watch from afar, relieved that it will probably never reach us.

Except with COVID-19’s Delta variant, that same storm could be coming our way. The people whose job it is to tell us that say so.

And unlike a thunderstorm or hurricane, we still have the time and power to prevent it from hitting us as hard.

We just have to listen to the professionals with the training, the technology and the access to the data that serves like a Doppler radar of disease. The CDC -- the National Weather Service of infectious diseases -- says it’s time to act now. So does our state public health department. So do professionals at universities and hospitals.

They’re telling us the number of cases in Michigan is going up, even though rates are low compared with our own horrific COVID-19 storms of April 2020, November 2020 and April 2021.

They’re telling us we should require masks on all our kids and teachers in schools, just like we did last school year. They’re telling us we should get our teens, young adults and pregnant women vaccinated, and persuade the remaining unvaccinated middle-aged and older adults to get the shot too.

They’re telling us that even if we are vaccinated, we should wear a mask in indoor public spaces so we don’t catch this new variant of the virus and spread it to those more vulnerable to a serious case than we are. They’re telling us that people with weak immune systems should get a booster shot to amp up their protection.

It takes time to make policies, and for vaccines to take full effect.

That’s why they’re telling us this now.

Meanwhile, a few loudmouths who have decided these experts are full of it have decided they’d rather trust their trick knee and some amateur weatherperson with a busted windvane instead. They want the freedom to send their kids out to play, even though the thunder is booming and dark clouds are gathering.

The problem is, they’re taking the rest of our kids - especially our grade-school kids - with them.

School districts that would never send kids out to recess in a thunderstorm, or even a gentle rain, are listening to these loudmouths. They’re preparing to bring kids back to school without truly listening to the experts who have the maps and the data and the technology. They’re looking up at the sky, seeing no lightning right now, and saying the kids can wear a raincoat if they want, but they can’t require it.

They’re waiting to see the big red blotches right over their school on the radar, and to have kids get soaked, hit by a falling tree branch or even struck by lightning before calling them inside. They’re worried the loudmouths will sue -- though the parents of an injured child could too.

Wouldn’t it be better for schools to do what they can now? To act on expert predictions and the radar map of the South, rather than amateur guesses and trick knees?

Maybe the weather forecast for coronavirus in Michigan will turn out like some storm warnings -- to have overstated the risk. Maybe voluntary use of masks and the current uptake of vaccines will be enough and the storm will break up before it gets to us. Maybe the storm will pass and the power won’t go out.

But when it comes to our kids’ health, wouldn’t we rather be safe than sorry?