Earlier this week, the journalist Matthew Walther argued in The Atlantic that many Americans do not care about COVID. This, sadly, is true. But it’s also callous. What it really means is that many Americans don’t care about the people who have died from COVID, and who will keep dying of COVID. To those who do not care, I say: COVID not only is worth fighting, it’s something we have to fight, whether we all want to or not. Even if you don’t care about dying strangers, those deaths—and all the complications that come with rampant disease spread—take a toll on all of us. A total of 7 million Americans are currently unemployed. According to a U.S. Census Bureau survey of American households this fall, almost 4 million Americans said they weren’t working because they were caring for someone or sick themselves with COVID symptoms; almost 2.5 million, because they were concerned about getting or spreading SARS-CoV-2; about 4.5 million, because they’d been laid off or furloughed due to the pandemic; and more than 3.2 million, because their employer had closed temporarily or permanently due to the pandemic.

Employers are anxious to get people back to work and back in the office. But any argument that everyone merely should throw up their arms and learn to live with COVID as we continue down our path toward endemicity dismisses very real fears. People will resume their lives when they feel safe. Right now, more than 1,000 Americans are dying from COVID per day, and as people gather for the holidays and the Omicron variant spreads, those numbers will trend up in the coming weeks. To communities where people are dying, these are not acceptable losses. They should be scared of dying from COVID, especially when they know their lives aren’t valued.