Seldom have we had to get to grips so quickly with a slew of new terms and abbreviations. Had you told most people last Christmas that soon they would be WFH, they might have considered it a cryptic insult. Most probably had only a vague idea what an epidemiologist did or what a ventilator was, while PPE was (if anything) a soft Oxford degree favoured by politicians, rather than the personal protective equipment now urgently needed in hospitals. Few could have told you the difference between an epidemic (the outbreak and rapid spread of an infectious disease through a population) and a pandemic (an epidemic that occurs over a very wide geographical area, perhaps the whole world).
Even the terminology of the virus itself is challenging: the coronaviruses are a family of pathogens, this particular one (being related to that which caused the Sars outbreak of 2002-3) denoted Sars-CoV-2. Covid-19 is the respiratory syndrome it causes, much as Aids is to HIV. A vaccine confers immunity (probably just for a limited period) to the virus; an antiviral interferes with viral replication in the body to slow or arrest its bad effects. Antibiotics attack bacterial pathogens, not viruses, but may be needed with Covid-19 to treat secondary infections such as pneumonia that take advantage of a compromised immune system. Expect to hear lots in the coming weeks about serological tests, which look for proteins in the blood that signal past infection, even if the virus has long since been cleared from the body. Those tests are under development, and they will provide vital information on how widespread infection has been – and whether many (or few) have had Covid-19 without any symptoms at all.
While comparisons with wartime and the blitz spirit are deeply misleading, one analogy holds: the second world war slogan “Loose talk can cost lives” is apt here too.
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Answer:
I’m confused by all these new words…
Seldom have we had to get to grips so quickly with a slew of new terms and abbreviations. Had you told most people last Christmas that soon they would be WFH, they might have considered it a cryptic insult. Most probably had only a vague idea what an epidemiologist did or what a ventilator was, while PPE was (if anything) a soft Oxford degree favoured by politicians, rather than the personal protective equipment now urgently needed in hospitals. Few could have told you the difference between an epidemic (the outbreak and rapid spread of an infectious disease through a population) and a pandemic (an epidemic that occurs over a very wide geographical area, perhaps the whole world).
Even the terminology of the virus itself is challenging: the coronaviruses are a family of pathogens, this particular one (being related to that which caused the Sars outbreak of 2002-3) denoted Sars-CoV-2. Covid-19 is the respiratory syndrome it causes, much as Aids is to HIV. A vaccine confers immunity (probably just for a limited period) to the virus; an antiviral interferes with viral replication in the body to slow or arrest its bad effects. Antibiotics attack bacterial pathogens, not viruses, but may be needed with Covid-19 to treat secondary infections such as pneumonia that take advantage of a compromised immune system. Expect to hear lots in the coming weeks about serological tests, which look for proteins in the blood that signal past infection, even if the virus has long since been cleared from the body. Those tests are under development, and they will provide vital information on how widespread infection has been – and whether many (or few) have had Covid-19 without any symptoms at all.
While comparisons with wartime and the blitz spirit are deeply misleading, one analogy holds: the second world war slogan “Loose talk can cost lives” is apt here too.
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