'Coro-nausea' and 'Plandemic': the words COVID-19 has taught us - Peter Medawar

My niece has contracted Omicron. At eleven, she’s too young to take a vaccine in the UK. I’m feeling a little nervous as I FaceTime her in quarantine.

She looks listless. I ask her how she’s doing.

"I have no energy," she says. "And a fever."

The Russians have two kind of envy: ‘black’ envy, and ‘white’ envy. I’m feeling the friendly ‘white’ variety as I tell her, "Chances are, you could end up with much stronger immunity than me."

Even though my niece is the first in my family to contract the virus, I’m sensing that COVID-19 is nearing its end. Now hospital numbers are dropping throughout Europe, the pandemic seems to be waning. So, are we really in an ‘endemic’ phase—or am I being premature?

Perhaps it depends on how many letters are left in the Greek alphabet. Sometimes I feel like a commentator on CNN, eager to ‘call’ the winner of a Presidential election, but wary of calling the wrong candidate.

Summarising two years, a plague and almost six million deaths feels like condensing a world war into a few pages, so I’m focusing on language. Much of 2020/2021 I’d gladly forget, but the parts I want to remember are anchored in words and phrases—some new, but some old and previously unknown to me.

'Coro-Nausea' 

Towards the end of 2021, my family had a game: see how long you could get through a day, or even a conversation, without mentioning COVID-19. I was saturated with imaginative theories and predictions, and it felt surreal having my experiences reflected both locally and globally, as presidents and talk-show hosts were all preoccupied with the same topic.

For me, COVID was interesting to talk about and boring to live through. This is particularly true for one of my vaccinated friends, who is currently undergoing his eighth quarantine, despite having never tested positive himself. 

For some, government policy in Italy and Austria verged on the despotic; I imagine sociologists of the future being fascinated by the imposition of mandatory measures, and doctors being upset about the abrupt transition from individualized medicine to ‘one size fits all’ vaccination policies.

In the future, will ‘coro-nausea’ give way to ‘coro-nostalgia’? Will some people miss wearing masks, washing hands and being face-gunned by temperature-checkers in supermarkets?

‘Plandemic'

The writer Yuval Noah Harari beautifully described the dawning age of science as ‘the discovery of ignorance’. I sense there was a great deal of ignorance exposed by this ‘novel’ virus.

For me, the strongest metaphor for the sheer scale of the problem was the Ever Given cargo ship, wedged across the Suez Canal in March 2021. It looked massive and immovable, just like COVID. At the time, I sensed there was never a way of ‘beating’ the virus, only of minimising its impact.

Did governments and health councils have a preferred outcome, or was it just ‘wait and see’? I tried to remain rational about the Great Experiment we’re living through, with two years of winging it and ‘Following the Science’; I never trusted ‘Big Pharma’, but my gut feeling regarding humanity favours opportunism over ‘evil plans to take over the world’.

I decided I trusted my medically-trained family members over some of my friends who magically became virologists after watching videos on YouTube. My grandfather, PB Medawar’s quote that “a virus is a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein” had a renaissance in 2020, while my father, a retired radiologist, remembers Polio as “…another virus that crippled, killed, or was a gentle flu, and is now extinct, worldwide…there were opponents of immunization then, too. Jerks.”

For final reassurance, I needed that Great Physician, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to guide me: ‘…all of the virologists and doctors and epidemiologists have studied diseases and vaccines for their entire lives, so I listen to them…if you have a heart attack, you don’t check your Facebook group, you call an ambulance.’

So I bumped elbows, kept my distance and washed my vegetables. I avoided crowds and wore masks on the beach, feeling like an idiot, in the drive to ‘keep everybody safe’. But then, following the contemptuous behaviour of [my] UK government, I developed doubts. By late 2021 I was teetering on the edge of a dozen rabbit holes, YouTubing doctors in bow ties, questioning public policy.

My Italian statistician friend’s claim that "There are lies, damned lies and COVID statistics" strengthened my distrust of numbers, which could be used to strengthen any argument. My attitude towards vaccines may have been different if I’d contracted COVID in 2020, as I never explicitly disagreed with the benefits of natural immunity over vaccination.

Now, as data grows supporting the long-lasting, polyclonal protection afforded by Omicron, I’m wary that the conspiracy theorists were right all along; will the unvaccinated sell their untainted blood for billions? Will the vaccinated become graphite-controlled 5G zombies with increased risk of mortality via embarrassment?

'Omnicron'

Since I read reports in January 2022 from South Africa, suggesting that the latest variant would go everywhere fast, I couldn’t avoid adding the ‘omni’ to this omnipresent virus. The predominant adjective for Omicron was ‘mild’, hopefully spreading swift natural immunity with blessedly reduced hospitalization; I couldn’t help feeling that Mankind dodged a bullet with this variant.

My favourite quote came from a conversation between two doctors in Uganda: ‘The Omicron variant is the vaccine that we failed to make.’

'Funishment'

I became addicted to medical reports; their language enriched my vocabulary. Soon I could discuss ‘immunological ‘naïvity’ to SARS Cov-2, clonal expansion of B Cells specific for antigenic epitopes, nucleocapsid-specific T-Cells, and pre-existing spike cross-reactive memory T-Cells’, without understanding any of them.

Some familiar words felt corrupted. I used to like ‘bubbles’ before they were used to divide people, and ‘breakthrough’, once a heroic advance, now refers to a fully vaccinated person being infected by the virus [a ‘vaccine’ breakthrough]. Thankfully no one is using the nauseating phrase ‘New Normal’ any more.

In addition to ‘Coveat’, ‘Cobo’ and ‘Angstipation’, I’ve come up with ‘Funishment’: over two years of puritanical caution, having a party could be ‘funished’ by quarantine, a fine, or hospitalisation. See also hangover, herpes and Boris Johnson.

'Child vectors'

In 2021 one of my Maltese friends, a paediatrician, asserted, ‘If adult mortality were as low as childhood mortality with COVID, we would never be talking about a pandemic at all.’ Since then I saw my son isolated at home for a fortnight because he was in the same room as a positive case, and then released after consistently testing negative.

Over the past two years I felt sorry for younger generations, from university students to school children, suffering for a disease that predominantly affected older people. By late 2021 I was unconvinced by arguments that restricting children would prevent them from passing the virus on to adults, not when such a huge majority of older people were vaccinated.

In the end, I was chastened by my son’s cheerfulness in isolation. Perhaps he was enjoying a fortnight of not wearing a mask and being snapped at by paranoid grown-ups with hand wipes.

Final thoughts

The core aim of governments throughout 2020/’21 seemed to have been protecting health systems, and preventing Intensive Treatment Units from being over-run with sick patients.

So should we now invest in building new hospitals, buying more equipment, training contingency staff and improving the working lives of doctors?

For me, the key is how to help the next generation: how can we improve life for the children who’ve sat through hot unventilated lessons, played sport in masks and only seen their friends through digitised lessons at home?

One common word in the Pandemic was ‘comorbidities’, a disease or medical condition which can significantly worsen a patients’ health if they have COVID. My friend, a Canadian author, tells me, "I’m 43, fit and I eat healthy but require immunosuppressive medication…Omicron is not mild for everyone, and those of us with health issues and disabilities have essentially been deemed worth sacrificing."

He’s not asking for endless lockdowns, just a little kindness and consideration.

Among the most commonly mentioned comorbidities are diabetes and hypertension. Hypertension, unfortunately, has rarely-noticed symptoms, which led to the fear of unknown numbers of vulnerable people blocking up the hospitals.

This ‘tip of the iceberg’ concept was a strong justification for restrictions. There were many arguments for and against masks, lockdowns and vaccines, and yet the dangers of bad diets were chronic long before 2019. Along with age, obesity was probably the most commonly quoted risk factor for severe COVID; now that huge resources have been thrown at controlling COVID, why not push for another campaign combating obesity?

Why not teach children more about how to cook for themselves, and how to limit the intake of salty, oily or sugared junk which proliferates our supermarkets? Why not emphasize that takeaways are a treat, not part of a regular diet?

I strongly believe in the benefits of regular sports and fitness, providing fun, social contact, and increased energy. Losing the right to play sport during the Pandemic, while all of the Pastizzerias remained open, and junk food mopeds circled the island, was one of the most frustrating aspects of the Pandemic for me.

Sport has been one of the few undisputed pleasures of my life; I don’t need a doctor to tell me that encouraging the blood to flow faster round my body helps in all areas of physical health, and I don’t need to read the ingredients for a Big Mac to know that it may make me feel lousy the next day.

I think it’s pointless worrying about future strains; our population is growing exponentially, and we’ll keep on bumping into new diseases which spread through our urban and travel matrices, following on from HIV, Spanish Flu, Avian Flu and COVID-19. For now, we should maintain a state of virological preparedness and enjoy life as much as possible, before we get wiped out by Omega.

Let’s push on with our evolution, working from home more to reduce traffic and air pollution, and promoting an educational system suitable for the 21^st century. And why not tackle grotesque social inequality, worldwide destruction of forests for agriculture, over-fishing and plastic pollution while we’re at it?

Five days after her Omicron diagnosis my niece took an antigen test: it was negative for a happy thirty seconds, and then…positive. When I FaceTime she’s playing Battleships against her mum, and she looks rosy-cheeked and healthy.

"How did you sleep last night?" I ask.

"Better. My sore throat has gone…still got a runny nose."

"So it’s basically just like…a cold..?"

She grins: "Yeah."