COVID-19 Terminology
Mary Chitty MSLS Last updated July 18, 2023.? [email protected] ?https://twitter.com/mchitty ??#covid
1.COVID Terminology 2. Ambiguous & Unfamiliar Terms 3. COVID-19 Glossaries and Dictionaries
Definitions include: boosters, vaccine effectiveness, breakthrough infections, close contact, contagiousness vs. infectious, exponential decay, exponential growth, frailty variation, herd immunity, overdispersion, pandemic vs.?endemic vs. epidemic vs. PHEIC Public Health Emergency of International Concern, R-naught (R?) vs. ?R(t), transmissibility, uncertainty vs. risk, ventilation
Nine Pandemic Words That Almost No One Gets Right, Katharine Wu, Atlantic, October 2021.???Actually, you’re probably not in quarantine. Also asymptomatic, fully vaccinated, vaccine effectiveness, breakthroughs, natural immunity. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/covid-vocabulary-pandemic-words/620351/?
2. Ambiguous and Unfamiliar Terms
Some unfamiliar terminology seems to be relevant to COVID discussions -- and some familiar terms turn out to have multiple and or ambiguous definitions. I'm working on definitions of infectious, virulence, and more.
boosters: The debate over Covid-19 vaccine boosters, what to call them, and whether they’re needed??Helen Branswell ? STAT News, Sept. 2, 2021.???But some experts in the vaccine world don’t think we should be using the “B” word to describe that extra jab.?Don’t call it a booster, they insist. Instead they argue an additional dose of one of the messenger RNA vaccines should be termed a third dose, a part of the primary series of shots that awaken and arm immune systems to deal with the threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.?… The third shot should be considered the final dose of the original series of vaccines, he argued. We may or may not need later boosters at a later date, Plotkin said. … It’s well known in vaccinology that when using inactivated or non-replicating vaccines —?vaccines that don’t use a live-virus to trigger an immune response —?multiple doses are needed. A priming dose (or doses) is followed four to six months later with an additional jab that helps the immune response to mature, he said. Many vaccines given in childhood are administered in a three-dose series, with a gap of several months between the second and third shots.?… “Calling the third dose a booster is immunologically incorrect and also gives the wrong impression that somehow the vaccines failed when they could not really have been expected to give a long-lasting immunity from the first doses,” Plotkin said. … We probably wouldn’t be talking about third shots or boosters — whatever you want to call them — but for the emergence of the Delta variant, he said. “Delta really changed the game.” … The jury’s still out on fourth shots, fifth shots, etc. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has publicly?raised the prospect ?that annual Covid shots may be required. The company’s official line is that annual jabs may be needed, but there aren’t enough data yet to say one way or the other.?
Plotkin agrees. “The idea of an annual booster will depend on what happens to the antibody level after this third dose,” he said. “I would hope that the antibodies would persist pretty well. But if I’m wrong and also if the virus changes considerably — that like with influenza, you need to adjust the vaccine to the mutations of the virus?— then I guess I could imagine annual vaccination. But we just don’t have the data yet.”??…. “What the general public wants to know and it needs to know is how many doses do I need? And when do I need to get them? And the scientists need to figure out whether those doses are going to be in the form of a primary series that would be relatively closely spaced together over a period of months or primary series and then a booster, which typically comes at a more delayed timeframe, down the road maybe years,” he said.
It’s also important for people to understand that the scientific and public health communities are still learning about the best way to use these vaccines, Duchin said. That means as new knowledge is acquired, recommendations on use of the vaccines — including, potentially, boosters — are going to evolve. https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/02/the-debate-over-covid-19-vaccine-boosters-what-to-call-them-and-whether-theyre-needed/
Mayo Clinic Q&A podcast: Breaking down the booster terminology for COVID-19 vaccines Dana Sparks, Aug. 18, 2021?"A?vaccine ?booster dose is generally an additional dose above and beyond the primary series needed to achieve protective immunity," says?Dr. Gregory Poland , an infectious diseases expert and head of?Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group . "So the dose that was approved this past week would be better classified as an 'additional dose' for those who are moderately to severely immunocompromised."?Dr. Poland says those people will have already received two doses, but they need the additional dose in order to improve their immune response to the vaccine.
Dr. Poland continues, "Offering a third dose of the same vaccine to older adults, health care providers and essential workers, that would be a 'booster dose.' Then if we used a variant-specific vaccine, which researchers are working on, that would be called a 'variant booster dose,'" says Dr. Poland.?? https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-qa-podcast-breaking-down-the-booster-terminology-for-covid-19-vaccines/
TWITTER?Céline?Gounder,?MD, ScM, FIDSA? @celinegounder?? Jul 20, 2021 . Thread 2/ Will we need COVID vaccine boosters? Firstly, is “booster” even the right terminology? I would argue not. I think what we’re talking about is refining the COVID vaccine dosing regimen.
3/ When your doctor prescribes you medication for high blood pressure & then increases the dose, it doesn’t mean that the medication doesn’t work. It’s that they didn’t know what dose would work for you or wanted to start lower rather than overshoot.
4/ Similarly with COVID, we’re still optimizing vaccine dosing regimens.
5/ With hepatitis B, we’ve learned that you need 3 doses. That 3rd dose isn’t a “booster.” It’s the 3rd dose in the series. We don’t give yearly boosters of hepatitis B vaccine. We just give a 3-dose series.
6/ For reasons we don’t entirely understand (though it makes a lot of sense), the immune system recognizes repeated exposures to a pathogen as a greater threat. Hence the success of vaccine regimens split into 2 or 3 immunizations.
7/ Why might you need more than one dose of a vaccine? - To extend the duration of an immune response (e.g. pertussis vaccine) - To overcome immune-evasion (e.g. influenza vaccine)
8/ Our immune response to some infectious diseases lasts longer than for other infectious diseases. Viruses and other pathogens mutate. The faster & more significant the mutations, the more quickly they’re able to evade our immune systems. Pathogens mutate at different rates.
9/ Mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein can lead to immune evasion. No SARS-CoV-2 variant fully evades our immune system. The Beta variant &, to a lesser degree, the Gamma & Delta variants, partially evade our immune responses.
10/ But If we have a strong enough immune response, we can still overcome that partial immune-evasion.
11/ How will we know whether we’ll need to tweak COVID vaccine dosing regimens? - Decreased vaccine effectiveness -- But it’s important that we be clear about what we mean by vaccine effectiveness. -- See Katherine Wu’s piece about this in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/coronavirus-breakthrough-infections/619416/
breakthrough infections:?Defining a vaccine breakthrough infection For the purpose of this surveillance, a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after they have completed all recommended doses of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-authorized COVID-19 vaccine. As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause. This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance ... Previous data on all vaccine breakthrough cases reported to CDC from January–April 2021 are?available. COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Case Investigation and Reporting, CDC, July 2, 2021.?https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html
The reality is that breakthrough cases are?normal and expected after vaccination. ... (One?slightly confusing thing about investigating breakthrough infections is that research is using the term differently. There’s the CDC’s definition of an infection two weeks after full vaccination. But some?studies?have also investigated breakthrough infections in people who have received only one vaccine dose, like Viterbo.?Other?research?addressing infections after vaccination doesn’t use the term?breakthrough?at all.)The really surprising thing about fully vaccinated people who get COVID-19: the number of so-called breakthrough cases we're seeing is even lower than expected, Slate, April 22, 2021.? https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrough-infections-cdc-data.html
close contact: The CDC changed this definition in 2022. Close Contact through?proximity and duration of exposure :?Someone who was less than 6 feet away from an infected person?(laboratory-confirmed or a?clinical diagnosis ) for a total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period?(for example,?three separate 5-minute exposures for a total of 15 minutes).?An infected person can spread the virus that causes COVID-19 starting 2 days before they have any symptoms (or, for people without symptoms, 2 days before the positive specimen collection date). Public Health Recommendations: People who are identified as close contacts should follow?CDC recommendations ?to protect themselves and others from COVID-19. Additional Information: This definition is for use by public health officials performing?case investigation and contact tracing ?activities as part of outbreak response activities. It may also be useful in certain settings where officials may choose to do contact tracing or investigational activities, such as high-risk congregate settings.?This definition does not represent all the ways someone may be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. A number of factors can influence a person’s?risk of getting ?COVID-19, including the type, proximity, frequency, and duration of their exposure, environmental factors (such as?crowding?and?ventilation),?vaccination status,?recent COVID-19 infection, circulating variants, and?mask use. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/contact-tracing/contact-tracing-plan/appendix.html#:~:text=and%20mask%20use.-,Definition,a%20total%20of%2015%20minutes).
contagious vs. infectious:?The difference between?contagious and infectious can be difficult to figure out because there is some overlap in meaning.
An infectious agent is something that gets you sick. An infectious illness is one that spreads by an infectious agent entering the body. A contagious illness is one that is spread by coming into contact with someone who is sick (who is infected with an infectious agent).
Something contagious (such as a virus or bacteria) is spread from one person or animal to another by touching or by coming into contact with another person or animal's germs.
All contagious diseases are also infectious because if you can catch it from someone then their germs (viruses or bacteria) are being passed to you. But not all infectious diseases are also contagious. Infectious illnesses are spread by an infectious (=infection causing) agent (such as a virus or bacteria) entering the body, but some infectious illnesses, such as food poisoning, cannot be spread to another person. Britannica Dictionary,? https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/qa/The-Difference-between-Contagious-and-Infectious-
correlates of protection:?Correlates are biological benchmarks—measurements of a single immune molecule or cell—that can show that a vaccine is achieving its desired effect. We're Zeroing in on the "Holy Grail" of COVID-19 Immunity, Katharine Wu, Atlantic, July 2021? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/correlates-of-protection-vaccine-immunity/619508/ ?See more in COVID 101 under Section 3. IMMUNITY. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/coronavirus-covid-19-resources-mary-chitty/
exponential decay:?Exponential growth means case numbers can double in just a few days. Exponential decay is its opposite. Exponential decay means case numbers can halve in the same amount of time. …It is possible to bring Covid-19 case numbers down quickly via exponential decay even before vaccination rates reach herd immunity. We just need to keep transmission rates below the tipping point between exponential growth and exponential decay: where every person with Covid-19 infects fewer than one other person, on average. Every single thing people can do to slow transmission helps — including wearing masks, getting tested, and avoiding crowded indoor spaces...?— it’s almost effortless, once enough people are vaccinated, to keep cases sustainably low. That’s the power of exponential decay. ... The tricky part is that it can be hard to know how much to ease up while keeping cases trending downward so exponential growth doesn’t get out of control, as is happening in India. ... Swings in case numbers are less dramatic when cases are lower. Cases will rise again if restrictions are lifted too soon?The Math that Explains the End of the Pandemic, New York Times, April 29, 2021.?https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/opinion/covid-
exponential growth bias: Correcting misperceptions of exponential coronavirus growth increases support for social distancing PNAS June 24, 2020,?117?(28)?16264-16266 ?Joris?Lammers ,?Jan?Crusius ,?Anne?Gast https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2006048117 ??People mistakenly perceive the coronavirus to grow in a linear manner, underestimating its actual potential for exponential growth. We show that correcting this perceptual error significantly increases support for social distancing. This research shows the importance of statistical literacy among the general public for increasing support to fight the coronavirus using the most effective method currently available ?…Making matters worse, people are overly confident in their ability to predict change. Particularly, those who have least knowledge about exponential growth and consistently apply linear thinking have particularly strong confidence in their erroneous forecasts (9 ,?10 ).?The current work tests the role of exponential growth bias in shaping the public’s view on social distancing to contain the coronavirus’s spreading.?https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2006048117t
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frailty variation:?refers to differences in risk between individuals which go beyond known or measured risk factors. In other words, frailty variation is unobserved heterogeneity. ...the literature on survival analysis can lead to surprising artefacts in statistical estimation that are important to examine. Understanding variation in disease risk: the elusive concept of frailty. International Journal of Epidemiology 2015:44 (4): 1408-1421.? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25501685/
herd immunity: A New Understanding of Herd Immunity, Atlantic, James Hamblin, July 13, 2020. The portion of the population that needs to get sick is not fixed. We can change it.?Gabriela Gomes studies chaos. Specifically, patterns in nonlinear dynamics. She was drawn to the field by something called frailty variation—why the same diseases manifest so differently from one person to the next. She uses mathematics to deconstruct the chains of events that can lead two people with the same disease to have wildly different outcomes.? https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/herd-immunity-coronavirus/614035/
The idea of herd immunity has been sold to the public as the way out of the pandemic. Some medical experts say the idea is probably not that useful in terms of understanding how the pandemic ends. … The herd immunity threshold represents a simple goal - more or less one number that spells the end of the pandemic. It feels really concrete, sort of something to grab onto in a time filled with so much uncertainty until you speak to the modelers who actually calculate herd immunity. SAMUEL SCARPINO: We make a bunch of assumptions that we know aren't true. BRUMFIEL: Samuel Scarpino runs the Emergent Epidemics Lab at Northeastern University. For example, he says computer models often drastically oversimplify the way people interact with each other. … MARC LIPSITCH: People talk about herd immunity as if it's a sort of endpoint - you either have it, or you don't, and once you have it, you keep it. And that's not true, either. BRUMFIEL: Things like new variants or the time of year can cause huge swings in how many people need to be immune to reach herd immunity.?…?it's that squishiness that makes all of these scientists say it's time to stop talking about herd immunity. MEYERS: I think we're focusing too much of our time, our effort on quibbling over a number.?BRUMFIEL: Instead, Lauren Ancel Meyers says all the computer models show a very clear way forward. MEYERS: Every vaccination gets us a step closer. Every vaccination makes our community, our society a safer, healthier place. Scientists Say It's Time For America To End Fixation On Herd Immunity, Geoff Brumfield, WBUR, May 17, 2021.? https://www.wbur.org/npr/997422830/scientists-say-its-time-for-america-to-end-fixation-on-herd-immunity
Scientists [at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)] developed a model showing that a fragile, temporary state of immunity emerged during the early epidemic but got destroyed as people changed their social behaviors over time, leading to future waves of infection…. Population heterogeneity -- these individual differences in biological and social susceptibility -- is particularly important because it lowers the herd immunity threshold."… "Herd immunity is a controversial topic," said Sergei Maslov, a … professor …?UIUC … "Since early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been suggestions of reaching herd immunity quickly, thereby ending local transmission of the virus. However, our study shows that apparent collective immunity reached in this way would not last." ... transient collective immunity has profound implications for public policy. "Mitigation measures, such as mask-wearing and avoiding large gatherings, should continue until the true herd immunity threshold is achieved through vaccination," said[Ahmet]?Elbanna.[at UIUC] "We can't outsmart this virus by forcing our way to herd immunity through widespread infection because the number of infected people and number hospitalized who may die would be too high." … The fact that a single wave stops doesn't mean you're safe. It can come back." Suppression of COVID-19 waves reflects time-dependent social activity, not herd immunity. Science Daily, April 14, 2021.? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210414132002.htm
overdispersion:?a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know that this is an?overdispersed?pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters?… Overdispersion should also inform our contact-tracing efforts. In fact, we may need to turn them upside down.?... Another significant consequence of overdispersion is that it highlights the importance of certain kinds of?rapid, cheap tests.?...Meanwhile,?researchers have shown?that rapid tests that are very accurate for identifying people who do?not?have the disease, but not as good at identifying infected individuals, can help us contain this pandemic.?...In an overdispersed regime, identifying transmission events?(someone infected someone else) is more important than identifying?infected?individuals. ... Overdispersion makes it harder for us to absorb lessons from the world because it interferes with how we ordinarily think about cause and effect. ... Although overdispersion makes some usual methods of studying causal connections harder, we can study failures to understand which conditions turn bad luck into catastrophes.?This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic, Zeynep Tufekci, Atlantic, Sept 30, 2020.? https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/
pandemic vs. endemic vs. epidemic vs. PHEIC Public Health Emergency of International Concern: ?Cleveland Clinic, No the COVID-19 Pandemic Isn’t Over, May 25, 2023. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-the-pandemic-over/ ??To understand why the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over, let’ s do a quick refresher on definitions.?An epidemic involves an increase in the number of cases of illness, but is limited to a specific geographic area — that area could be as small as a single town or as large as a country.?An infection is?endemic?if the case numbers stay relatively consistent over time and the illness stays localized to a specific place. For example, malaria is endemic in India. ?In a?pandemic, there’s an exponential increase in cases occurring in multiple places around the globe. There’ve been many pandemics throughout our history, including in the recent past.?The 2009 outbreak of?H1N1 — also known as swine flu ?— was a pandemic. It caused more than 280,000 deaths worldwide in a single year. It was a massive tragedy, but pales in comparison to the devastation COVID-19 has caused.?... a PHEIC is: “An extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response.” … To qualify as a PHEIC, the WHO says a disease has to: Be serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected; Carry implications for public health beyond the affected State’s national border; Require immediate international action.
risk: See under uncertainty.
R-naught (R?) and how is it different from R(t)? R-naught (R?), represents the natural ability of a virus to spread in an unprotected population where no special precautions are being taken.?R(t) , in contrast, takes into account public health measures or the development of a?vaccine . This makes R(t) —the actual or “effective” of the virus under current conditions — a more accurate reflection of the number of people that a single infected person is expected to infect in a specific area at a specific time. It is also more relevant than R? in directing public policy and informing private behavior. The value of R(t) can change over time, depending on such factors as how many people are staying home or wearing masks. At Covid Act Now, we look at R(t), or?infection rate , because it represents more closely what is happening right now and is calculated based on actual case data. Covid Act Now https://covidactnow.org/faq#vaccines
transmissibility:?As countries roll out vaccines that prevent COVID-19, studies are underway to determine whether shots can also stop people from getting infected and passing on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Vaccines that prevent transmission could help to bring the pandemic under control if they are given to enough people. Preliminary analyses suggest that at least some vaccines are likely to have a transmission-blocking effect. But confirming that effect — and how strong it will be — is tricky because a drop in infections in a given region might be explained by other factors, such as lockdowns and behaviour changes. Not only that, the virus can spread from asymptomatic carriers, which makes it hard to detect those infections.
“These are among the hardest types of studies to do,” says Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. “All of us are out there, hungrily trying to see what we can get out of little bits of data that do come out,” he says. Results from some studies are expected in the next few weeks.?Can COVID vaccines stop transmission? Scientists race to find answers Nature Feb 2021? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00450-z?
uncertainty:?The condition in which reasonable knowledge regarding risks, benefits, or the future is not available. MeSH Medical Subject Heading 2003
An event or outcome that is not certain but may or may not happen is uncertain. When the uncertainty is quantified on the basis of empirical observations, it is called?risk. Bandolier EBM Evidence-Based Medicine Glossary.? https://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/glossary.html
ventilation: Ventilation is a term with different meanings to different people. For the purpose of this webpage, “ventilation” includes: Indoor air movement and dilution of viral particles through mechanical or nonmechanical (also called natural) means. Filtration through central heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems and/or in-room air cleaners (portable or permanently mounted).* Air treatment with Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI) systems (also called Germicidal Ultraviolet or GUV).* * These air cleaning techniques are sometimes referred to as “equivalent ventilation.” They are not a substitute for meeting minimum outdoor air delivery requirements that may be specified in national, state, and local building codes.?Ventilation in Buildings, CDC, May 13, 2023 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/ventilation.html ??
How is it that six months into a respiratory pandemic, we are still doing so little to mitigate airborne transmission? ...Part of the difficulty with this discussion has been that the relevant experts, including infectious-disease specialists, epidemiologists, environmental and aerosol engineers, don’t even agree on the terminology. The particles we emit from our mouths can be called droplets, microdroplets, droplet nuclei (particles that start out bigger but get smaller because of evaporation) or aerosols. There is no clear line between big and small particles and droplets and aerosols; it’s a continuum with?complex aerodynamics ?depending on the environment, and to make matters worse, the same word—like aerosol—sometimes means something different in each field. We need to talk about Ventilation, Zeynep Tufecki, Atlantic, July 30, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent-we-talking-more-about-airborne-transmission/614737/
See also COVID 101: Section 3 What we do and don't know now https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/coronavirus-covid-19-resources-mary-chitty/
2. COVID-19 Glossaries and Dictionaries
CDC, Glossary of Vaccines and Immunizations, Last Reviewed Dec. 1, 2022. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/terms/glossary.html About 170 definitions.
CDC Glossary of Key Terms: Contact Tracing, Aug. 11, 2022. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/contact-tracing/contact-tracing-plan/appendix.html#Key-Terms About 13 definitions.
COVID Act Now?https://covidactnow.org/glossary ?January 18, 2021, about 90 definitions.
Kaiser Family Foundation?https://www.kff.org/glossary/covid-19-outbreak-glossary/ ?about 30 definitions.
Medium, All the coronavirus terminology you need to know, May 1, 2020.? https://elemental.medium.com/coronavirus-covid-19-glossary-eb148cc04f33 ?About 50 definitions.
Yale Medicine?https://www.yalemedicine.org/stories/covid-19-glossary/ ?April 7, 2020, about 32 definitions.
Oxford English Dictionary
Using corpora to track the language of Covid-19: update 2, Kate Wild, July 15, 2022.?Each month we run searches to identify words which are markedly more frequent in that month than in the corpus as a whole (‘keywords’ for those months). As described in our?April blog post , keywords in January, February, and March included those describing and naming the virus and the disease (coronavirus ,?Covid-19 ,?respiratory,?etc.), and those referring to the social consequences and medical response (social distancing ,?self-isolation ,?self-quarantine , lockdown,?PPE, ?ventilator, etc.). The keywords in April, May, and June show further shifts and changes: … For?OED?lexicographers, these keyword searches help to highlight significant terms that we need to consider adding to the dictionary:?thus, this month’s new additions include?contact tracer n., face covering n., and?Zoom v/2,?among others. They also highlight entries that need revisiting in light of recent developments, such as?furlough?n. and v. For any given term we can then dig further into the data: for example, a quick analysis shows that the most common recent use of the noun?covering?is in?face covering?(facial covering?is also used but much less frequently), and that this term has significantly increased in frequency since April, as shown in the chart below. In fact, the term has a long history – our new entry shows that it dates to a1732, in a general sense – but its current frequency and cultural significance make it an important addition to the dictionary now.? https://public.oed.com/blog/using-corpora-to-track-the-language-of-covid-19-update-2/
July 2020 update: scientific terminology of Covid-19, Trish Stewart, July 15, 2020.?As we increase our understanding of the virus and its effects and potential treatments, specialist scientific and medical language is increasingly prominent in everyday discourse. As the saying (recently) goes, “we’ve all become armchair epidemiologists”.? ,,, It’s not uncommon for the name of a disease to be applied to the pathogen causing it (and vice versa), and this case is no different: Covid-19 is now being used for both the disease and the virus. And a multiplicity of abbreviations of Covid-19 have also appeared. While the official name for the disease caused by the coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 is?Covid-19 , the terms?Covid ,?C-19 ,?CV-19 ,?CV , and?corona? are also used to refer to the virus and the disease.?CV?and?corona?both appear well before the current pandemic, 1985 and 1974 respectively, because they have been used in reference to other coronaviruses. Thus although World Health Organization (WHO) documentation has 11 February 2020 as the date on which the name Covid-19 was officially bestowed, evidence shows that CV-19 was used as early as 22 January 2020, because CV is an earlier abbreviation for coronavirus. As time goes on, we’re sure to come up with other abbreviations; for example ‘rona’ is currently trending in Australia and the U.S.?
We’ve updated the original definition of?Covid-19 , no longer defined as ‘an acute respiratory illness’ but ‘a disease…characterized mainly by fever and cough’, ‘capable of progressing to pneumonia, respiratory and renal failure, blood coagulation abnormalities, and death’.?This reflects new information about the effects of the virus on multiple organ systems.?OED?first published an entry for?coronavirus ?in 2008. We’ve now added a?second sense ?that refers specifically to those coronaviruses that cause life-threatening diseases in humans, including SARS, MERS, and Covid-19.?... Many of the more serious and lingering effects of Covid-19 appear to be the result of a?cytokine storm . First described in the context of Graft Versus Host Disease, this is an overactive immune response involving the excessive production of cytokines which results in inflammation and can lead to organ failure and death. This is why many people continue to be affected by a variety of symptoms, even after their immune system has cleared the virus from the body.?,,, Most of the vaccines for Covid-19 currently under development target the viral?spike protein . These glycoproteins project from the envelope of a virus, binding to receptors on a host cell and allowing the virus to insert its genome into the host. It is hoped that a vaccine which stimulates the immune system to produce antibodies to coronavirus spike proteins will help prevent the virus from infecting host cells.? … Many of our most urgent questions about the Covid-19 are related to the epidemiology of the disease, how quickly it spreads and how fatal it is. Early in the pandemic, it was established that there was widespread?community transmission ?or?community spread ?of Covid-19, meaning that the disease was being transmitted between members of a community through casual contact. One of the features of this type of transmission is the difficulty in establishing sources of infection for individual cases, making it harder to contain outbreaks of a disease. … ?The need for accurate communication of complex ideas and topics has never been greater, and the?OED?will continue to update its coverage of these specialist terms, charting their passing from scientific journals to newspapers and social media.?https://public.oed.com/blog/july-2020-update-scientific-terminology-of-covid-19/
Social change and linguistic change: the language of Covid-19, Bernadette Paton, April 9, 2020. It is a rare experience for lexicographers to observe an exponential rise in usage of a single word in a very short period of time, and for that word to come overwhelmingly to dominate global discourse, even to the exclusion of most other topics.?Covid-19 , a shortening of?coronavirus disease 2019, and its various manifestations has done just that. As the spread of the disease has altered the lives of billions of people, it has correspondingly ushered in a new vocabulary to the general populace encompassing specialist terms from the fields of epidemiology and medicine, new acronyms, and words to express the societal imperatives of imposed isolation and distancing. It is a consistent theme of lexicography that great social change brings great linguistic change, and that has never been truer than in this current global crisis.?WFH noun 1995 verb 2001; ??Some of the terms with which we have become so familiar over the past few weeks through the news, social media, and government briefings and edicts have been around for years (many?date from the nineteenth century), but they have achieved new and much wider usage to describe the situation in which we currently find ourselves.?Self-isolation ?(recorded from 1834) and?self-isolating ?(1841), now used to describe self-imposed isolation to prevent catching or transmitting an infectious disease, were in the 1800s more often applied to countries which chose to detach themselves politically and economically from the rest of the world.??Infodemic ?(a portmanteau word from?information?and?epidemic) is the outpouring of often unsubstantiated media and online information relating to a crisis. The term was coined in 2003 for the SARS epidemic, but has also been used to describe the current proliferation of news around coronavirus. The phrase?shelter-in-place , a protocol instructing people to find a place of safety in the location they are occupying until the all clear is sounded, was devised as an instruction for the public in 1976 in the event of a nuclear or terrorist attack, but has now been adapted as advice to people to stay indoors to protect themselves and others from coronavirus.?Social distancing , first used in 1957, was originally an attitude rather than a physical term, referring to an aloofness or deliberate attempt to distance oneself from others socially—now we all understand it as keeping a physical distance between ourselves and others to avoid infection.?And an?elbow bump , along with a hand slap and high five, was in its earliest manifestation (1981) a way of conveying celebratory pleasure to a teammate, rather than a means of avoiding hand-touching when greeting?a friend, colleague, or stranger.?,,, PPE ?is now almost universally recognized as?personal protective?(or?protection)?equipment—an abbreviation dating from 1977 but formerly probably restricted to healthcare and emergency professionals. The full phrase –?personal protective equipment ?– dates from as far back as 1934.??https://public.oed.com/blog/the-language-of-covid-19/
Curated COVID Articles Table of Contents??www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/mary-chittys-covid-articles-table-contents-mary-chitty/ ?
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