Last week I came down with COVID-19. Again.

I’m not even sure why I tested. I just really didn’t feel well, and I wanted to know if I was overreacting or if I actually was as sick as I felt. For hypochondriacs like myself, it’s kind of nice to have validation that it’s not in our heads when there actually is a virus making us feel terrible. And I just happened to have one COVID-19 test left in the medicine cabinet.

I’m just one of many Americans to have gotten sick in the past few weeks, due, I’m pretty positive, to our children’s return to the germ circus that is school. I’m also one of many Americans who wasn’t clear on what I was supposed to do once I saw the two lines on the test. I wondered if there were even protocols anymore, or if we are just treating COVID-19 like a cold now.

I went to InstaCare seeking guidance and possibly magic medicine that would immediately eradicate my symptoms. Alas, no such medicine exists. I was essentially wished the best of luck. The doctor wrote me a prescription for Paxlovid but warned it probably wouldn’t do much for a run-of-the-mill case like mine. “Get lots of rest,” she instructed, and I did. Not because she instructed me to but because I felt so miserable I could barely get out of bed. I ibuprofen-ed and Ny-quilled my way through it, just as I did the previous two times — maybe three times — I had it. Honestly, I’ve lost count.

What I did not do this time was tweet about it. Partly because truly, no one cares any more, and announcing that I have COVID on social media feels very 2020 and passé. But mostly I didn’t post about it because I’m scared of the guy on X who seems to blame me for the pandemic.

I believe it started the last time I had COVID and wrote a light-hearted column about the inconvenience of getting COVID when it’s no longer seen as a deadly threat and the world seems to have moved on. I underestimated how passionate people still are about the virus. That column, in which I compared COVID to the Backstreet Boys, received 114 comments, none of which had anything to do with what I wrote, except for one that diagnosed me with a case of self-importance. Which is a pretty good burn, I have to admit.

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But one guy found me on X, which is not hard to do if you know my name. There, he accused me of being a liar. He said I was corrupt. “You (journalists) are unbelievably stupid corrupt liars,” he wrote.

He came back later to write, “Unhinged are the lunatics who write stupid drivel like this because they got slightly ill for a day or two.”

While the drivel accusation may be true, the lying and corruption charges were, in my opinion, unfounded.

His accusations spilled over into more X posts. And then more. And my confusion grew. And then I realized — this person blames me for the pandemic. Or perhaps more specifically, he blames the media for the lockdowns, the masking and the assorted inconveniences of the past five years.

I understand the desire to blame someone. A person with a brain and feelings that can be hurt when they read mean comments about them online is a much easier target than a virus. Maybe this is why people are still raging about COVID-19 all over social media long after life went pretty much back to normal.

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Like others, my tormenter won’t let it go. He continually tags me in his posts about lockdowns and masking (in 2024, mind you), and if I post anything even remotely related to COVID, there’s a near immediate reply from him accusing me of being responsible for all that’s wrong in the world.

Honestly, at this point, I’m impressed. Because I think he created a system to continually remind me that I am to blame for his anger. And I just don’t have that kind of work ethic in me. Nor do I care about anything so much as to set up a system to automate it. And his efforts have been so effective that I, someone who loves attention, didn’t even post on X about getting sick again.

Maybe that was the goal all along. To keep me from embarrassing myself with a cringey post reminiscent of the early days of Facebook when we’d write things like “I’m really not feeling well. Don’t want to talk about it.”

In which case, I sincerely appreciate it. And I’m feeling much better now, in case you were wondering.

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