Vocabulary in times of COVID

It goes without saying that nowadays everything we see or hear has something to do with coronavirus. That’s why I’m going to give you all the key terms and vocabulary so that you can discuss this really important topic with confidence.

Let’s start with the name of this illness: COVID-19 which stands for CORONAVIRUS DISEASE 2019. It started with an outbreak in Wuhan, China. Then it started to spread to more people and other areas so it became an epidemic. And finally, the WHO (World Health Orgnanization) declared COVID-19 a pandemic which means that the epidemic had spread all over the world. 

Seeing as a very contagious virus, authorities all around the world took several emergency measures in order to control this problem and try to avoid community spread. Many cities and countries were in lockdown which meant that people weren’t allowed in or out of their places. Another measure was contact distancing where people reduce the contact they had with other people. Therefore, countries cancelled sporting events, the use of public transport was reduced and people had to work remotely so you could often see in messages WHF meaning ‘I’m working from home’.

People started stockpiling which meant people going to supermarkets to buy up all the toilet rolls (impossible to explain) or loads of dry food so they didn’t run out at home. In some cases it became panic buying and people went to supermarkets to buy all the things they could.

Many people were under quarantine if they had the coronavirus or symptoms of it. They were asked to self-isolate so they separated themselves and stayed at home for about 14 days. Some of these symptoms could be: fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, among others.

 Super spreaders are  asymptomatic who have the virus but they don’t show any symptoms and they look perfectly normal so without knowing they spread the virus to other many people. 

As people were worried about shaking hands because was a way of spreading the virus, they started touching elbows and the phrase the Wu handshake appeared.

Of course people couldn’t forget to wear their facial masks covering their mouths and noses to avoid the spread of germs and use hand sanitizer more often than not.

As you can see everything has been written in past because this is something all of us are looking forward to: talking about the virus as something which happened a looooong time ago.