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# Sick of being sick
- URL: https://werd.io/sick-of-being-sick/
- Published: 2021-12-15T16:53:18.000Z
- Updated: 2021-12-15T16:53:18.000Z
- Author: Ben Werdmuller
- Tags: #Import 2025-06-13 09:24

I’ve got the [more-intense cold that’s been doing the rounds](https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/its-not-covid-but-an-especially-intense-cold-is-going-around/2584876/), and I hate it. Of course, I’d much prefer to have this than COVID: as annoying as it is now, there shouldn’t be any long-term effects, and I’m not heading to the hospital any time soon. So I consider myself lucky.

We hit [800,000 US COVID deaths this week](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/12/14/1063802370/america-us-covid-death-toll). Almost 1 in 6 people in the country have contracted it. It’s [the third largest killer after cancer and heart disease](https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-continues-to-be-a-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s-in-august-2021/) \- which itself is an improvement on the beginning of the year, when it was the number one cause of death.

I’m mad at myself for catching a cold: if I caught this, I could have caught something much worse. I’m lucky enough to be triple-Pfizer-vaccinated (and [donate to COVAX](https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/covax-mission-forges-ahead-vaccinate-world-against-covid-19/38636) so more of the world can be), and I’m masked in public. But the risk isn’t zero, to myself or others: as bad as I’d feel catching COVID, I’d feel worse passing it onto someone else.

I’d really like this pandemic to end. But unlike the world presented in [this famously awful Atlantic article](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/where-i-live-no-one-cares-about-covid/620958/), we can’t pretend that it has. I’m looking forward to a world without masks, where we can gather again and build community in person, but it isn’t here quite yet. Hopefully next year.