A Pandemic Doesn’t End Just Because You Want It To

Heidi S.
9 min readFeb 13, 2022

What they don’t tell you when you learn about the Plague or the 1918 influenza pandemic is how unfathomably annoying everyone will be.

Set aside the politicization for a moment. There are people out here, nearly two years in, whining about wearing masks and restaurants closing and wanting to go back to normal. And when I hear this, I feel like I’m talking to a child who is throwing a tantrum because they want to ride on a brontosaurus. I don’t know what to tell you, Sport, that’s just not how it works. A pandemic doesn’t end just because you don’t wike it.

I feel like I am losing my mind.

Close up of a man rubbing his temples in annoyance
Photo by Siavash Ghanbari on Unsplash

As I’m writing this, the official number of people in the US reported to have died from Covid-19 is 910,373. And that number is sure to hit a million by April. Because people are still dying. More than 63,000 people died in January 2022. That’s more than the population of Youngstown, Ohio. This pandemic isn’t over no matter how much you pretend it is.

Hospitals are still overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients (2/4/2022), and in many places this has caused people who need other medical procedures to be turned away. The media’s line was that the omicron variant was “mild.” Meanwhile, hospitalizations hit a new high in January 2022 with the omicron surge.

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Heidi S.

PhD in philosophy | Feminist | Anarchist | Pop culture junkie | Kpop listener | Actually Autistic