Mom, are we Pandemic yet?

As I sit in my pajamas at work today, eating a cookie, it occurs to me that people are awfully good at jumping when they step on a thorn but awfully bad at losing weight.  I'm not that worried about being plump (today in particular) but I am interested in our lack of ability to react appropriately to Very Bad Things that happen slowly, or under the skin, or in the air.  People seem to lack a combination of math and imagination in this regard, or mistake it for anxiety.  Certainty of a bad thing is not the same as worry about it.

Okay, I am going to type The Very Bad Thing I am thinking about in case I review this in future and have forgotten.  It's this coronavirus which causes this disease which is called Covid19.

To start with, people can't even talk about it right.  My doctor's office has a big sign about Corona!  The poor Corona beer company has lost something like $300M so far because people are muddled in this way.

No folks, it's not a beer, its a virus. But like the Many-Faced-God it has many names.

People started off calling it Wuhan Flu, that was shortened to WuFlu.  Then it was China Flu but that was considered discriminatory against China so people called it Coronavirus.  Trouble is, there are lots of Coronaviruses so people started looking for a name.  They took too long, so nobody really cared when they came up with names.  WHO called it Coronavirus disease 19 (abbreviated to COVID-19 but who cares about the hyphen) on February 11, 2020.

Just to complicate matters, the virus is called SARS-CoV-2.  It was named by Coronaviridae Study Group (CSG) of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. They explained in their naming paper that it was not a new species of virus but almost the same as SARS-CoV which is why it only warranted a "2" after the name.

So, everyone who is running around calling it flu should notice that it is not a flu, it's a SARS.

Now, back to the bad thing. Many people in Seattle are going about their daily lives thinking that it is a normal day and I suppose it is. The sun shone.  The birds twittered a little earlier as spring sneaks up on us.  But it is not a normal day because many people around us are preparing to fight a Pandemic infection that has got a bit out of control here.

We are not there yet... but we'll stop for some gas and we'll get there soon.