·        Quarantine

A quarantine, a practice first recorded in the Old Testament, meaning probable exposure to an illness. People are removed from the general public for a period of time—voluntarily or by legal order—to see if the disease develops. The word quarantine dates to the Black Death’s spread along the Mediterranean in the fourteenth century, when governments imposed isolation for forty days—or quaranta in Italian. The Black Death killed some twenty-five million people, about a third of the European population at the time. Italy and China have mandated quarantines in response to COVID-19. The most restrictive measure is isolation after a person has symptoms or is confirmed to have a disease by a lab test. In quarantine, you’re waiting to see if you develop the sickness, if you’re in isolation, you are sick and waiting until the illness resolves. The quarantines in China were misguided and too much, too late. They have been done in ways that could jeopardize lives, because healthy and ill people are stuck together in vast geographic regions.

 ·        Social distancing

Social distancing is voluntarily keeping a few feet away from other people or opting not to go to mass gatherings based on the recommendation of public-health officials. 

 ·        Shelter-in-place

Politicians have repeatedly rejected the persistent unfounded rumors that a shelter-in-place order is looming on the horizon.

 ·        Restrict the personal movements

China was the first country to forcibly restrict the personal movements, public events, and business activities of its people—eleven million in Wuhan, the megacity and global epicenter of the COVID-19 coronavirus. 

 ·        Outbreak

To contain the largest outbreak in Asia, Chinese health and security officials went door-to-door—checking for people with symptoms.

 ·        Lockdown

The lockdown was widened to more than a dozen other cities in Hubei Province, constraining the daily lives of sixty million people. It’s the largest quarantine in human history.   On Sunday, March 15th Italy locked down its northern regions—including Venice and Milan, the country’s economic heartland, and home to sixteen million people—for at least a month to contain the largest outbreak in Europe. Nationwide, all public gatherings, including weddings and funerals, were banned.  That is a national emergency.  

 ·        Nobody in/ nobody out

The measures would be as draconian as nobody in or nobody out.

 ·        Panic buying

Many countries, including Russia, are facing the panic buying at the moment. People are scared too much about the possible and inevitable, as it seems, shortage of supply, food, medicine or first aid necessities.

 ·        Covidiot

Do not you be such a covidiot and think of visiting your grandmother!

For more reading see also:

A Guide to the Coronavirus

·         How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.

·         How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.

·         What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.

·         How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?

·         Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.

·         The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.

·         We are all irrational panic shoppers.

·         The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.

·         How pandemics change history.