A Linguistic Prediction
Soon enough you will start hearing a new word: pandemiologist. Google barely knows about it yet.
An epidemiologist studies epidemics. You can guess what a pandemiologist studies.
We have epidemics all the time. Pandemics have been relatively rare — one or a few per century — until about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when the curve began to tip upwards. Beginning late last century a confluence of factors has accelerated the trend: hot zones in Africa, industrial-scale pig farming in China, wet markets selling exotic meats across Asia.
Some epidemiologists, like the U of MN’s Michael T. Osterholm, have been warning for years of the increasing danger of increasingly frequent pandemics. (Here is a report he authored in 2005.)
It won’t be long before those epidemiologists who specialize in pandemics begin to rebrand. You read it here first.
🙂
Here is evidence that Google has barely heard of the word pandemiologist yet, as of 9:55 am CDT on the morning of June 19, 2020. To get to this screen I clicked the link in the initial search that said “Showing results for epidemiologist / Search instead for pandemiologist”. Most of the hits are for “pandemiology” (and are somewhat tongue-in-cheek), and only one for “pandemiologist.”
