Surges, spikes, flattening lines - that's our language with COVID. We've had a lot of metaphors this spring and summer - mostly war metaphors. So I went looking for the others:
The evil trickster - "The corona viruses therefore need some clever tricks to survive." and "While not technically alive, there's an evil genius to viruses that never ceases to amaze me".
A bullet train - Andrew Cuomo "The infection forecaster said to me, 'We were looking at a freight train coming across the country.' "We're now looking at a bullet train."
Flattening the curve - here are the variations on the theme
take the heat out of transmission
breaking chains of infection – or better “BREAK THE CHAIN“
controlled burn
starving the virus of fuel
slow it in its tracks and push it back (Leo Varadkar)
Boris Johnson: send the coronavirus packing
and: remove the invisibility cloak from the invisible virus through testing
and: turn the tide
keeping the lid on
Hockey time - FAUCI: "It’s the old metaphor – the Wayne Gretzky approach. You know, you skate not to where the puck is but to where the puck is going to be. If we don’t do very serious mitigation now, what’s going to happen is that we’re going to be weeks behind, and the horse is going to be out of the barn.”
Trump's first description of the Pandemic: "It's just like a regular flu" and then he moved on to war imagery "an invisible enemy". In opening up - "the people of our country should think themselves as warriors."
So it isn't surprising to find that the virus has a brand personality. It is the subject of an academic research paper by George Rossolatos: Ontological Metaphors We Get Sick By: a Brand Storytelling Approach to the COVID19 Pandemic.Transformations and consequences in society due to covid-19 pandemic.
I was shocked to see Sumacs in St. Catharines yesterday that were orange and red, as I await Grimsby's Autumn colours. Here's a nostalgic picture of the Grimsby Farmer's Market when it was on Main Street.
