Cure yourself of fake news: how to read about the coronavirus
The outbreak has generated a tsunami of information. Here's how to sift the fact from the fiction
Seldom have we had to get to grips so quickly with a slew of new terms and abbreviations. Had you told most people last Christmas that soon they would be WFH, they might have considered it a cryptic insult. Most probably had only a vague idea what an epidemiologist did or what a ventilator was, while PPE was (if anything) a soft Oxford degree favoured by politicians, rather than the personal protective equipment now urgently needed in hospitals. Few could have told you the difference between an epidemic (the outbreak and rapid spread of an infectious disease through a population) and a pandemic (an epidemic that occurs over a very wide geographical area, perhaps the whole world).
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