Formerly known as Coronavirus!

We know the word CORONA is Latin for Crown. I've been using it a lot recently, since Coronavirus hit the headlines, early in 2020. Have just produced 4 webpages that feature it prominently. Here they are in order of creation:

1) Coronavirus

2) Corona Graffiti

3) Corona Clap

4) Corona Chic

& now to crown it all

Is this my crowning glory? My crowning achievement?

Here is Corona-Central, a hub, which brings all 4 pages together, for easy reference. A convenient go-to for all things Covid-19 related by Yours Truly Digital Graffiti Artist

Avid for vivid covid prose & virus verse?

check out

this tentative TETRALOGY

1	2
4	3

Dr June Almeida, a pioneer of virus imaging, first identified the human coronavirus in 1964 at her laboratory in St Thomas's Hospital in London.

virus

Depicted thus, beautiful to look at,

like a colourful abstract painting,

except there's nothing abstract or beautiful

about the painful death victims might suff

graffiti

clap

It's not the first or even (yet) the worst pandemic. The 1918 influenza (H1N1 virus) infected about one-third of the world's population at the time & caused an estimated 50 million deaths.

Before that, you've heard of the Bubonic Plague? Black Death? Great Plague? Mutatis mutandis, same difference with what we are witnessing now, ours with somewhat less severity.

chic

Daniel Defoe in a Journal of the Plague Year (about the Great Plague in 1665) made some apposite observations. Then as now, carriers may be asymptomatic during the incubation period:

“the infection was propagated insensibly, and by such persons as were not visibly infected, who neither knew whom they infected or who they were infected by.”

As for the danger of shopping (& I don't mean merely over-spending!), plus ça change it seems:

“And here I must observe again, that this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city; for the people catched the distemper, on these occasions, one of another;”

Wet market in Wuhan? Highly probable. Some unknown biological warfare laboratory? Rather unlikely. Whichever, one might concur with Defoe about its provenance: “It mattered not from whence it came;”

PS evidence now suggests it emanated from Wuhan Lab. Funded by U.S. Government to carry out research on virus gain-of- function

FILE PHOTO: Security personnel keep watch outside Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Wuhan, Hubei province, China February 3, 2021. REUTERS/Thomas Peter/File Photo

PS - December 2020 update: the Virus is MUTATING & there is now a variant version that transmits more easily...

4th January 2021, 3rd national lockdown begins in U.K.

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Talking of Crowns, as I did above, although my surname is King, I am no royalist. I'd prefer to wear a Jester's "crown." King or Clown, human heads become skulls soon enough.

“It comes to this: like all of us who have not yet died of plague he fully realizes that his freedom and his life may be snatched from him at any moment.” Albert Camus, La Peste.

QUAINT QUADRILOGY?

(Oops, I guess this 5th page makes it a PENTALOGY. Punchy rather than paunchy I hope!)

brought to you by:

Bye

Seeing the wood for the trees

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I make my work freely available to one & all. Share as you like, with an acknowledgement of course. If you find this page interesting, entertaining or useful (choose whatever epithet you think fits), please consider making a donation via PayPal here. It's safe & secure.

This entire large website has been a real labour of love by Yours Truly. I don’t get paid & have to cover all running costs out of my own small pocket. Am in the proverbial starving (at least slightly peckish) artist in a garret situation. Give what you can. Thanks. Happy to gratefully name check any contributor, unless you prefer to be an anonymous donor.