I admit, Zoologic Spillover didn't pick up the way I thought it would. It picked up a bit, but mostly in more scientifically-inclined groups instead of meeting the mainstream the way I predicted. Also, the correct term is zoonotic spillover, not zoologic. I probably misremembered the term, but I can't find the original article I read it from, so I can't guarantee it wasn't their fault.
People do in general believe that the disease started because of a bat or a pangolin. If anything, pangolin should have gotten into the phrase guide, because so many people have just learned what those are.
If you don't know, this is a pangolin:
It's a little armadillo/aardvark type guy!
The United States 25 cent coin for 2020 depicts a couple of bats:
So as you might imagine, conspiracy theorists are finding a lot of material to work with with that.
I also mentioned that social distancing was a very frightening term, and that physical distancing was preferred inside my organization. This is because being socially active by video, phone, or with appropriate distance is still healthier than full isolation, even during this pandemic. Well, physical distancing has picked up some speed, and now it is sort of equivalent with social distancing in terms or what people and organizations are using. Kind of like how there isn't a clear winner between COVID-19 and Coronavirus in how people refer to our current predicament. I'm sort of in favour of COVID-19, because it's more specific than Coronavirus, which is a more general term for the family the virus belongs to. But I don't like writing COVID, because it feels like I'm yelling.
Now let's jump into some phrases
Covidiot: A covidiot is someone that forgoes basic safety measures, sometimes intentionally. Examples of these are the people in Japan who flocked in large crowds to view the cherry blossoms, the people in Florida that could not bring themselves to miss out on going to beaches, the Million Maskless March, held in Illinois, and the 200+ party that got busted in Brampton. We even have our own group of covidiots gathering in Kitchener, today in Victoria Park, calling themselves "Hugs Over Masks".
In that vein, people who refuse to to wear masks are being derivatively refered to as "anti-maskers" in a similar way that people against vaccines are called "anti-vaxers".
Super Spreader: A super spreader is someone who managed to expose an abnormally large number of people to COVID-19, or in an especially damaging way. They are distinct from the covidiot, as the emphasis is on the damage they caused, but not necessarily their intent or carelessness. An example of some super spreaders could be the two women who visited New Zealand from Britain to attend a funeral. New Zealand had just declared itself as one of the first highly populated nations to fully recover from the Coronavirus. They had removed all restrictions except for keeping their borders closed, only allowing in people for essential work or for compassionate reasons.
So a couple women were given the greenlight to enter for compassion reasons. They were required to do a 14-day self-quarantine, but got the okay to leave early since they weren't showing symptoms. They were in close contact with hundreds of people that day, came back, and received test results stating they were positive for the virus. It will take vigorous contact tracing and at least a few months for NZ to get back to where they were.
#withme, #bettertogether #stayhome: I don't really know what these mean and a quick Google search didn't help much, but they seem to be popular hashtags, that you attach to content to increase visibility. What they seem to communicate overall is to be safe, to take relevant precautions, and to support one another while doing so.
Essential vs Non-Essential: These are old phrases since most things have opened up, but I didn't really cover them. During the initial stages of the pandemic, many people had to stop work due to being considered "non-essential". This caused Canadians to reevaluate the importance of some occupations. Before, we tended to judge how respectable a person's position was based on how difficult it was to attain that position. However, during the pandemic, we began to change the focus of respect from level of difficulty to level of necessity. For instance, we were pretty used to respecting doctors and nurses and this didn't change, but during the worst of it, we learned to put grocery store employees and truckers on a similar level of respect.
There were some hurt feelings from people working in fields that were labeled as "non-essential" and a lot of fear about job security. Some people working in essential positions felt they were being taken advantage of, with the government financially incentivizing them to put their lives at risk by continuing their work. You were only eligible for CERB (Canadian Emergency Relief Benefit, $2000 per month) if you lost work to the pandemic, which didn't include quitting because of fear for personal safety. So many underpaid grocery workers were being asked to handle crowd control and expose themselves to the virus while being paid less than those who were told to stop working and hide in their homes.
Another criticism of CERB is that you don't qualify for it if you live on Disability, which offers far less. Odd that the government believes the necessary income for a decent standard of living is so much higher for people who don't have disabilities.
New Normal: We are being taught that when the pandemic ends, things won't quite go back to the way that we are used to. This concept frightens a lot of people, but honestly, I will be mighty frustrated if everything does just go back to the way things were. Scientists were already saying that the event of a global pandemic was not a matter of "if" but "when". We need to change a number of our practices and step into the future more intelligently, or we've got more coming to us.
Second Wave: We keep comparing COVID-19 to the Spanish Flu, which happened about a century ago. That's not an adequate sample size to make accurate predictions with, but it's also really hard to ignore. The Spanish Flu hit in three "waves", and stayed in the Earth's system over the course of a few years. So even though in Canada, where we've got our infection rate nice and low and we've been able to mostly reopen the economy without consequence, we're told to brace ourselves for a second wave. This is because the Spanish Flu died down for the most part during the summer and then came back even harder in Fall. Scientists are saying we will almost inevitably see a second wave this Fall, with students returning to classes and the cold weather bringing people indoors, but since we're practiced in safety measures now, and because we've developed so many remote work options, the second wave doesn't have to be as mean as the first one.
Remember when I talked about the phrase "Flatten the Curve"? That referred to the attempt to stop a line on a line graph from spiking with rapidly increasing rates of infection. So when that line starts to sink, with people recovering faster than they are being infected, and eventually nearing the bottom and stabilizing there, that is when we've completed a "wave". When the numbers start to spike again after a period of stabilization, that's referred to as the "second wave".
The United States, after initiating safety measures, saw a decline in rate of infection, but before they could stabilize near the bottom of the graph, they relinquished a number of safety precautions and the rate of infection increased again. There's some debate about whether or not the US should be considered in their first or second wave, but it's really all semantics. Spiking rates of infection should be handled the same way, regardless of which "wave" they're considered to belong.
Plan-demic: This indicates a specific video of the same name, which strives to prove that COVID-19 was planned. The general idea is that it was created in a Wuhan laboratory. I haven't watched the video, but there have been a lot of conspiracy theories in this vein. Some people feel the virus was developed as a biological weapon to be used against the protesters in Hong Kong, and it got leaked. Some people think it was a move by the Chinese government to weaken the United States, as China is coming out of this stronger than the US. It gets as wacky as some people believing the virus was developed so that once a vaccine is introduced, they can plant us with a microchip administered via syringe, which will allow us to be controlled mentally through the use of newly developed 5G cell phone technology.
I don't subscribe to any of the above theories. I understand how upsetting the circumstances are, and how it causes us to doubt, mistrust, and question the intentions of world leaders, but this is far from the first time we've dealt with a virus of pandemic potential, it's certainly not the first time in history that a global pandemic has swept the globe, and scientists have been predicting this for awhile.
Expect another update from me soon. My family in Guelph just adopted a cat and my girlfriend met a set of grandparents. So I should be writing about that next.
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