The Covidified world

Every time we hear of more infections, hospitalisations and deaths owing to Covid, there is an involuntary exclamation of resignation: how long will this agony last?

When I say it's going to be around for some time, I am branded as a pessimist, and sometimes worse, a doomsayer! I am neither. I only wonder how the virus can just vanish in a few weeks or even months from the face of the earth. 

We have seen how the pandemic has broken national and state borders that segregate the over 7.5 billion people of the world. The coronavirus has permeated through even the most well-fortified barriers.

We have also learnt that it's not just the marvels of telecommunication that have made this world a global village, it's also the travellers, mainly the international ones.

THE MSS TRIUMVIRATE

There is now a new world order (not economic but social), dictated by Mask, Sanitiser and Social Distance. 

It's okay if friends aren't invited for social occasions. It's also okay if we aren't invited.

It's okay if friends don't call on us when they are in our city. It's also okay if we don't call on them when we are in their city.  

Looks like we are beginning to make peace with the microscopic parasite. The villainous ring around it seems to be gradually dissipating.

Lockdowns are giving way to self-isolation.

Government-mandated testing procedures are giving way to testing in the comforts of our homes with home-kits.

Results of self-testing at home are also being considered official. That's, obviously, if people volunteer to inform the government.

"HAVEN'T SEEN YOU FOR AWHILE ... ALL WELL?"

No one wants to take a chance these days. Some aren't even testing if they have symptoms or have been a close contact. They immediately self-isolate. When there are symptoms, how does it matter if it's Covid or not: better to isolate, is the refrain.

But if someone hasn't been seen in public for a few days, does it automatically mean s/he was self-isolating, with or without Covid? 

Or it's just because s/he had an injury in her/his leg, and was confining to indoors?

Welcome to the Covidified world!

A mom's concern

I was passing by a school. The classes for the day had just got over and the children -- mostly in the 7 to 10 age group -- were streaming out of the main gate.

There were parents or guardians waiting to pick up the kids. A small boy, may be around 7 or 8 years old, on seeing his mom (or may be his guardian), ran towards her, and hugged her.

The first thing she did was to adjust her son's mask to the correct position. 

Just as she was doing that, the boy sneezed, twice.

The next instinctive reaction of the mom was to anxiously touch his son's forehead and neck, obviously, to check if he had fever.

PS:

Omicron has arrived in India, it looks like, as indicated by the breakneck speed at which the daily positive cases is increasing. Virologists are expecting this 3rd wave in India to peak next month.

Home town or hometown

One of the important functions of my job profile is to check the accuracy of facts and language.

To check facts, I do a lot of Googling so much so that the search engine, mistaking me for a robot, often makes me jump over human-verification hoops!

To check the accuracy of language, I turn to online dictionaries. 

When I began my career in the pre-computer era, we had just one dictionary on the desk, and all of us went by that. It used to be mostly Oxford.

Today, we have at least six well-known dictionaries that are just a click away. But sometimes that has only made the task difficult.

Though all of them give us the same meaning, there are inconsistencies, especially in usage. Here is a good example.

Home town or hometown?

These dictionaries say it's two words

Lexico

Longman 

Macmillan 

And these say it's one word

Cambridge

Collins

Dictionary.com

Lexico.com is a collaboration between Dictionary.com and Oxford University Press. But still, Lexico and Dictionary.com differ.

Longman says it's two words in British English and one word in American English.

Macmillan and Collins say it can be either two words or one word.