Pandemic, Epidemic, Endemic: A Word for All the People
In early 2020, much of the world waited for the World Health Organization to say a single word. When it finally did, on 11 March, the word was “pandemic”, and you could almost hear the collective intake of breath.
I wrote a short post at the time pointing out that the word itself wasn’t anything to fear. It describes what’s happening. It doesn’t make it happen. I still think that’s true, although I was rather too optimistic about how long it would all last. Linguists, it turns out, make poor epidemiologists.
The word comes from the Greek pandemos, meaning “of all the people”, from pan, meaning all, and demos, meaning people. The same demos gives us democracy, demographics and, less happily, demagogue. In ancient Greece, pandemos could simply mean public or common. Plato even has a character in the Symposium distinguish between two goddesses of love: Aphrodite Ourania, the heavenly one, and Aphrodite Pandemos, the common, everyday variety. Make of that what you will.
Its two siblings come from the same family. An epidemic, from epi, meaning upon or among, is a disease that comes upon a population, spreading well beyond what’s normal in one place. Endemic, from en, meaning in, describes something that lives within a population, a constant presence rather than a visitor. And a pandemic is an epidemic that has spread so widely it belongs, in the worst sense, to everybody.
What strikes me now, looking back, is how much weight we put on the naming. People argued about whether it was a pandemic yet, as if the virus was waiting for official permission. Later, the argument shifted to whether COVID had become endemic, which in some circles was taken to mean “over”, when the word simply means “here to stay”. Endemic isn’t a synonym for harmless. Malaria is endemic in parts of the world, and nobody there regards that as good news.
That’s the trouble with words that carry emotional weight. We start reacting to the word rather than to the thing it describes. “Pandemic” frightened people; “endemic” reassured them. Neither reaction had much to do with what the words actually mean.
It’s not a habit confined to medicine. Organisations do it constantly. Announce a “restructure” and people panic; call the same thing an “evolution” and they relax, at least until the redundancy letters arrive. The words change how people feel, but they don’t change what’s happening.
The answer, in a crisis or a boardroom, is the same. Ask what the word actually means, and then look at what’s actually going on. Sometimes the word turns out to be scarier than the thing. Sometimes it’s the other way round. Either way, you’re better off knowing.
