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The Miss-Lou’s COVID-19 numbers as of Thursday are at a peak with 101 cases in Adams County and 88 cases in Concordia Parish with a combined 12 deaths.

As somber as that is, those numbers could be much higher if local and state officials had not acted quickly to implement social distancing and stay-at-home orders in both Mississippi and Louisiana and residents adhered to them.

Now, we wait and we hope and pray that the numbers will flatten out and perhaps begin to fall as some health experts are suggesting.

As we wait with baited breath, however, now is the time to start contemplating what a reopened Miss-Lou will look like.

Local businesses, including hospitality industries, mom and pop shops, tourism-related businesses and restaurants, should start making plans now for how to move forward in the post COVID-19 pandemic world.

Plans for sanitizing, accommodating seating positions with newly learned social distancing guidelines and how to protect not only customers but also employees from potential exposure to the virus are all issues with which businesses will have to grapple in order to get back into operation.

Use the weeks, days and hours to plot, strategize and plan because it is starting to look as if a light toward the end of the economic shutdown tunnel is coming into focus.

That light is still a ways off, but it is not too soon to start planning for a sensible business plan to get back into operation.

We need to be ready to reopen in the proper manner when the time is right.