Of course you’re tired of the pandemic. We all are. But succumbing to pandemic fatigue will condemn many to death.

On Wednesday, the bells of the National Cathedral began ringing, and they didn’t stop for one hour, fifteen minutes, and fifty-five seconds—tolling 800 times in all. Listening to it, I found myself drowning in sudden, immense grief: Each ringing of a bell was still reverberating when the next one started. It was such a brief time to honor a life. And then with horrifying clarity I remembered: the tolls didn’t represent one person’s life. Each bell tolled for a thousand lives lost to Covid-19. And they just kept rolling.

Exactly one year before, I’d listened to the same bells ringing 300 times for 300,000 Americans, before sitting down at my desk to write a year-end piece looking toward the future: How could we avoid these mistakes in the year to come? How could we move beyond such an immense pain?

And now here we are. We are all tired. Beyond tired. Some of us don’t care about the virus or the pandemic; some of us never did. Some of us care so intently, it’s changed who we are, how we think, how we look at the world and our place in it. Read more at The New Republic.