The pandemic vocabulary, A to Z
Medical jargon jumped into the popular lexicon this year faster than you can say “unprecedented.”
The onceinacentury public health crisis necessitated a new vocabulary and gave rise to a panoply of buzzwords that helped us make sense of our rapidly changing reality.
One year later, it’s hard to remember just how strange we felt mimicking the jargonfilled language of public health experts, or how selfconsciously we first slipped “pandemic” into a sentence.
But as we all became amateur epidemiologists, something even stranger happened: words that were once novel quickly became commonplace, even cliched. Here are some of the words that helped define our pandemic year:
Antibodies: Protective proteins detected in the blood; microscopic sentinels that can help prevent people from enduring a coronavirus infection more than once
Asymptomatic: Describes a viral carrier who fails to develop fever, fatigue or other telltale signs of infection; double-edged sword of transmission whereby an estimated 1 in 5 infected people circulated invisibly without becoming ill themselves
Bubbles: Social groups that formed to help their members tolerate isolation; term used to rebrand ill-advised gatherings as an acceptable loophole in pandemic restrictions; gave rise to the phrase “bubble up”
Coronavirus: Family of illnesses that take their name from the Latin for “crown” due to the spiked shape captured by the now-famous red and gray illustration; the contagion that emerged in early 2020 and produced a pandemic and a worldwide lockdown, upending life for billions of people for more than a year — and counting
COVID-19: Abbreviation for the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus in which ‘CO’ stands for ‘corona,’ ‘VI’ stands for ‘virus,’ ‘D’ stands for disease and 2019 was the year it was first discovered; an encapsulation of a contagion that altered nearly every aspect of daily life
Contact tracing: Tactic used since the 1800s to break the chain of viral transmission; basic public health procedure carried out by downloadable digital apps in many countries, including Taiwan, New Zealand and Iceland
Droplets: Large respiratory particles; transmitters of viral infection alarmingly effective at bouncing from one facial orifice to the next, necessitating the widespread use of masks to reduce the risk of exposure
Essential workers: Designation conferred on anyone who could not work from home and was at high risk of contracting the virus on the job; often thanked with signs, sentimental Super Bowl commercials and saccharine tributes, yet sometimes not given proper protective gear or hazard pay
French Laundry: Iconic Napa restaurant; lavish setting for back-to-back scandals after Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed attended birthday parties there while pleading with constituents to avoid mingling households to tamp down the spread of the virus
Fauci (Dr. Anthony): Scientist and doctor who achieved a level of public adoration rarely conferred on public officials that resulted in Halloween costume tributes and a fawning portrayal by Brad Pitt; shorthand for steady, plain-spoken pandemic expertise at a time of profound misinformation spread by former President Donald Trump
Flatten the curve: Urgent plea to halt viral spread; idiom employed by civic leaders and health care experts meant to persuade constituents to heed public health guidance and stay home, thus lessening the trajectory of graphs showing mounting new infections that threatened to overwhelm hospitals
Herd immunity: Indirect protection from infectious disease resulting from high immunity within a population of people; goal of strategy pursued by some elected officials to justify shunning masks, social distancing and business closures in order to reopen shuttered economies more quickly
Inequity: Different pandemics for different people; deep-set structural injustices whereby the costs of the pandemic were disproportionately borne by poorer segments of society that lagged in everything from paid sick leave to testing to vaccination
Isolation: The loss of social connection; feelings of anxiety, hopelessness, grief and stress that affected nearly every segment of the population and defied easy categorization or treatment, despite the cultural dominance of wellness techniques and virtual substitutes for personal connection
Long-haulers: Survivors with lingering illness; growing category of people beset by debilitating and littleunderstood symptoms such as brain fog and fatigue months after they recover from COVID-19
Lockdown: Mandates to stay home for all but the most essential needs; first weeks, then months, then a whole year marked by austerity as stay-home orders waxed and waned with the severity of regional outbreaks
Mascne: Portmanteau for “mask acne”; unwelcome pimples around the mouth and chin caused by facial coverings that promote the proliferation of humidityloving, blemish-causing bacteria
N95: Face mask coveted for its ability to filter particles from the air; protection sought after by the general public early in the pandemic despite pleas to reserve it for health care workers
Outbreak: Sudden spike in cases in a limited geographical area; deadly eruptions of new cases among the vulnerable in settings like San Quentin prison, nursing homes and other closequartered living settings that highlighted the dangers posed by the coronavirus
Pandemic: Worldwide epidemic of an infectious disease officially declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020; havoc-wreaking event of historic scale
PPE: Acronym for personal protective equipment; critical gear used to stem viral spread, usually made of single-use plastic, that was in short supply at hospitals, where some health care workers donned trash bags in lieu of medical gowns
Quarantine: Isolation period imposed in cases of known or suspected infection; catch-all term used to describe the tedium of living in limbo without basic social interactions for an indefinite period of time
Rent: Monthly tenant payments; fees that plummeted as offices and storefronts languished and many people could not work, thus racking up thousands in unpaid bills with scant government intervention; gave rise to the phrase: “Cancel rent”
Shelter-in-place: Restrictive, first-in-the-nation order implemented by Bay Area counties; ongoing policy encouraging residents to limit movements, interpreted by some to mean bunker-like isolation, by others to mean taking bareminimum precautions
Social distancing: Space recommended to prevent airborne droplet migration between two people; 6-feet strategy encouraged with signage, frequent announcements and sidewalk markers, but flouted during protests, election celebrations and holiday lines for PS5 consoles
Super-spreader: Individuals or events that infect a large number of people; ill-advised gatherings often held in defiance of fundamental health advice. Examples include: a Rose Garden ceremony to introduce Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett; the surreptitious San Francisco church wedding that infected the bride, groom and at least 10 guests
Testing: Nasal swab to determine infection status; metric for understanding the breadth of the pandemic that required a network of drive-through and walk-up clinics where individuals endured the sneeze- and gag-inducing discomfort of a long cotton swab inserted into the nasal cavity
Vaccine: Single or double shot of antibodies that provide immunity; long-awaited and rapidly developed pandemicending panacea that sparked a glimmer of hope at the end of a brutal year, but whose rollout was marked by confusion, scarcity and frustration
Variants: Viral mutations; dread-inducing developments that raised critical questions about the trajectory of the pandemic as scientists scrambled to track each new variation with alphanumeric names to prevent geographic stigma
Work from home: Emptying out of traditional offices to stem viral spread; ennuiinducing practice of laboring and living in one setting marked by frequent snacking, procrastination and lethargy
Xenophobia: Surges of antiAsian racism, scapegoating and hate-fueled attacks against people of Asian descent reported globally; ugly phenomena that experts linked to racist rhetoric espoused by former President Donald Trump and other world leaders who attempted to shift blame for the pandemic to China and Chinese people
Zoom: Videoconferencing software company; wildly successful platform that rose above a crowded field to become a savior to offices and families and a facilitator of dull meetings, awkward cocktail hours and forced family gatherings