8 January

The politics of language. ‘Living with’ natural disasters. Take floods. We live with floods, in that we know they will sometimes happen. We DON’T live with them WHILE THEY ARE HAPPENING. We live with floods, but we don’t live IN floods. We use emergency measures to save lives and mitigate damage. Covid is the same. ‘Living with’ Covid DOESN’T mean letting it just infect everybody. That’s like telling people to try to drive down a flooded street. It means using every tool we have to suppress the virus, and to prevent more people getting infected with it.