For the past few weeks, my daily existence has been scored by the melodies of late winter: the drip of melting ice, the soft rustling of freshly sprouted leaves—and, of course, the nonstop racket of sneezes and coughs.
The lobby of my apartment building is alive with the sounds of sniffles and throats being cleared. Every time I walk down the street, I’m treated to the sight of watery eyes and red noses. Even my work Slack is rife with illness emoji, and the telltale pings of miserable colleagues asking each other why they feel like absolute garbage. “It’s not COVID,” they say. “I tested, like, a million times.” Something else, they insist, is making them feel like a stuffed and cooked goose.
That something else might be the once-overlooked common cold. After three years of largely being punted out of the limelight, a glut of airway pathogens—among them, adenovirus, RSV, metapneumovirus, parainfluenza, common-cold coronaviruses, and rhinoviruses galore—are awfully common again. And they’re really laying some people out. The good news is that there’s no evidence that colds are actually, objectively worse now than they were before the pandemic started. The less-good news is that after years of respite from a bunch of viral nuisances, a lot of us have forgotten that colds can be a real drag.
Once upon a time—before 2020, to be precise—most of us were very, very used to colds. Every year, adults, on average, catch two to three of the more than 200 viral strains that are known to cause the illnesses; young kids may contract half a dozen or more as they toddle in and out of the germ incubators that we call “day cares” and “schools.” The sicknesses are especially common during the winter months, when many viruses thrive amid cooler temps, and people tend to flock indoors to exchange gifts and breath. When the pandemic began, masks and distancing drove several of those microbes into hiding—but as…
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