As the first coronavirus cases hit home this week, too many North Texans are hanging on for dear life to one of two ends of the emotional seesaw — panic or denial.

Our local leaders and the institutions created for our protection seem to be doing a decent enough job navigating this mysterious mess of an illness. It’s just too bad they can’t hand out some kind of chill pill to help folks find the middle ground in dealing with a scary bug that’s likely to be with us for quite a while.

The extremes are hard to miss, whether at the neighborhood coffee shop or the virtual town square of social media: For each hysterical “buy up every disinfectant in the county” reactionary, you’ll also find a “move on down the road; nothing to see here” denier.

The wiser, and much more difficult, path is to take precautions and be patient for answers. This is a brand-new disease and it will take longer than any of us want before scientists can attain the necessary deep understanding of it.

Tolerating that kind of uncertainty is asking a lot of people at a time when — even before “social distancing” and “presumptive positive” became water cooler talk — our toxic political scene has the potential to turn any conversation into a contact sport. Now the coronavirus has amped up the anxiety level even more.

In neighborhood social media groups, posts about porch-package thieves have been pushed aside for countless photos of grocery store aisles — accompanied by the gleeful “I found toilet paper here” or the frowny-face emoji saying “no luck.”

People are legitimately worried about getting to family weddings, winding up stuck on cruise ships and how to keep kids entertained on spring breaks that might stretch for weeks. But information-based posts too often devolve into Facebook name-calling about who is to blame for the state of things and who is being hysterical.

In places where it counts the most in North Texas, leaders seem to be making clear-headed decisions. City halls are putting into action the plans that have been in the works for weeks. Deep cleaning is under way in schools, airports and other public venues. Events that bring together large groups of people are being canceled.

Custodian George Cox (right) carries a respirator and cleaning supplies into Jim Spradley Elementary School in Frisco, Texas, on Thursday, March 12, 2020. Frisco ISD custodial crews worked to disinfect campuses throughout Thursday in light of the COVID-19 global pandemic. (Lynda M. Gonzalez / Staff Photographer)

School districts are surveying families about travel plans and suggesting self-quarantines after some trips. Places of worship are informally rehearsing — in the event of a full-blown quarantine — how they would re-create their services in studio settings.

I’d love to be one of those adventurous types who are grabbing at the coronavirus-spawned opportunities of cheap flights to exotic destinations. Or better yet, to buy into the argument that this is all much ado over something that hasn’t yet killed nearly as many people as the garden-variety flu. But every day comes more information that points to how seriously we need to take this disease.

Comforting myself with the flu analogy worked for a week or so, but I’m increasingly losing patience with it. The flu is notoriously contagious and sometimes deadly but it’s predictable. Medical experts understand the disease — how it behaves, how it spreads and how to treat it.

Coronavirus is a wildly unknown variable in the disease world. With doctors figuring it out as they go, the best that those outside the medical profession can do is make their best guess on closing schools, quarantining employees, canceling sports events and the gazillion other decisions that will have to be made in coming days.

Faced with these inconveniences, it’s tempting for the healthy ones among us to point to the statistic that 80% or so of cases will cause, at most, mild symptoms. But the other 20%? Severe pneumonia is a possibility — and 5% of those cases can become critical or even fatal.

The expert whose words kicked me hardest in the heart is Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease. She spoke earlier this week about the people most at risk of becoming seriously ill: Those who are over 80 and those who have underlying health conditions.

It’s mostly for their sake that we can’t afford to make light of the coronavirus. None of us is immune to the disease, and common-sense measures by everyone to steer clear of exposure will help save the lives of the most vulnerable. That’s the logic behind canceling large public gatherings and encouraging employees to work from home if possible.

Among the many local leaders making contingency plans this week is senior pastor George Mason, whose Wilshire Baptist Church gained international notoriety in 2014 when the fiance of a congregant was diagnosed with the Ebola virus.

Although Mason cautioned that we mustn’t create a false equivalency between the coronavirus and the far more deadly Ebola, he told me this week that some of the lessons learned six years ago still apply, especially when it comes to providing comfort and confidence.

He recalled the first Sunday morning after Thomas Eric Duncan was diagnosed with Ebola after traveling from Liberia to Dallas to see church member Louise Troh. “We looked up into our church balcony and saw 15 TV news cameras lining the rail,” he recalled

“In the vacuum of information available and in the midst of panic across Dallas, we had the opportunity to preach a message of faith over fear,” he said.

Although Duncan died, Troh and her family members, all of whom were quarantined, never became ill — and Wilshire’s members never wavered in their support.

Mason sees that as a message for us all to heed in this latest medical crisis: Believe the science and let it lead the way as we practice moderation in all things.

That’s good advice. Whether your plans this weekend were partying at the now-canceled Dallas’ St. Patrick’s Parade on Saturday, or, like me, planning to visit a nursing-facility-bound aging family member, it’s been an unsteadying week for us all.

It likely won’t be the last, so let’s all endeavor to do it with a little more grace and a lot less snark.