NEologisms may have the excitement of the strange, but there’s nothing exciting about the ‘quad-demic’ if it bothers you. Even if the idea of escaping a whole series of events excites you, you would still rather catch a cold, or perhaps sprain your ankle, than get one of the four: flu, Covid, respiratory syncytial virus, or norovirus.
Nevertheless, with warnings of a ‘tidal wave’ of illness this winter, every time someone is sick I want to know where they would place themselves on the quad. And everywhere you look people are sick, which is why I think they call it a “quad-demic”. It’s none of my business, especially in the case of norovirus. It takes careful restraint to keep me from looking for symptoms.
And still I start endless investigations about what it could be, what the person thinks it is, all my investigations are fully clinically tested. Have they done a Covid test, I want to know (and this is often by email; it is not because I think they are going to infect me, unless they can do that remotely). Have they ever had the flu before? If so, does it feel anything like it did back then? Do they have itching at the back of their nose, which can apply to any of the three airways and also to someone who is not sick? Do they know who they think took it from? What did That person thinks it was?
I wonder if it’s a post-pandemic effect, a lingering superstition, that when infections are in the air, you have to keep yourself constantly informed about who has what, even if they’re just guesses. I could do something useful like wash my hands, but instead I ask if the headache came first or if there were chills. I’m making some sort of ‘quad-demic’ symptom tracking app, instead of the crass amateur that I am. And it begs the question: why am I collecting all this data if I have nothing useful to do with it?