Stop Using War Metaphors to Talk About COVID-19

May 29

Anyone who knows me (or has been reading this blog for a while) knows how strongly I feel about careful use of words. Words have meaning—both literal and figurative—and if we are careless with either type of meaning, it can have long-lasting and far-reaching consequences. Uninformed or hasty word choice can be a window into our biases, and shape people's perception of issues and events. Which is why we need to stop using war imagery when we talk about COVID-19.

It's no wonder that the war metaphor took a strong hold (at least in my recollection) in early March as the virus spread in North America and the warnings came from overwhelmed Italian hospitals. Medical professionals were making the kinds of triage decisions you'd see on literal battlefields: not only who gets treated when, but who is deemed worthy of treatment at all when there aren't enough doctors, beds, or ventilators to treat all the critically ill people. Combine the decision of who will be left to die with literal tents outside hospitals, and the picture of war hospitals becomes crystallized in our minds. But months later that image of war remains there in continued uses of more subtle phrases and metaphors, many of which were used in healthcare long before this pandemic:

Heroes
Front lines
Fighting
Battle(field)

As much as I love a good metaphor, conflating healthcare with war is dangerous. Metaphorical language is a rhetorical device, not a logical one; it's meant to persuade you. Metaphors aren't facts; they are comparisons. They help us understand things by comparing them to things we already know and understand. If Romeo calls Juliet the sun, we hear him calling her a beautiful, warm light. But when you use a metaphor, you can end up conjuring the wrong image by leaving out specifics or context. The lion is a common metaphor with many different metaphorical meanings: Do you mean to evoke the fierceness of the lion, or its killing prowess? If you choose a sloppy or unclear metaphor, you can get unintended meaning.

By framing COVID-19 as a battle and the healthcare workers as soldiers, we are building a deadly unintended meaning—and no, I don't mean "deadly" as in "really good." Soldiers sign up for a job that, at its worst, comes down to kill or be killed. It's a terrifying reality, but it's one that soldiers are fully aware of when they choose to enlist. I don't know a single medical professional who signed up to kill or be killed. On the contrary, most go into the field because they want to save lives, to help people. They recognize that this can mean hard decisions and difficult days, which can include life and death choices, but medicine requires a much different mindset than war.

There are innumerable recent examples of referring to reassigned healthcare workers as being "redeployed." No. Just, no. See how I used the word reassigned? It works just as well without implying that we are sending people behind enemy lines and they might never return.

The other—in my opinion even more terrifying—potential effect of framing this pandemic as a war is that it allows us to think of dying human beings as expected casualties. In war, you have the "good" side and the "bad" side (though that simplistic understanding of a complex issue is a conversation for another day). If someone on the "bad" side dies, we tend to accept that—even welcome it as part of the path to victory. And if someone from the "good" side dies, we are likely to view it as a noble sacrifice as they fought for justice.

We've already seen political leaders openly suggest we sacrifice people's lives in service of the economy (and you could argue that many policies and approaches that have been taken around the world are suggesting the same sacrifice more subtly), but the evidence of a numbing acceptance to these deaths is all around us. We hear numbers of cases and deaths, but rarely do we see the names or the lives of those lost. People are being reduced to statistics, but we need stories to understand more than we need numbers.

Even the attempts to personalize these losses seem small compared to the scope of the loss we see in North America. On May 24, The New York Times dedicated its front page to listing 1,000 names and micro-obituaries of Americans who have died of COVID-19, but that’s just one per cent of America's death toll. BuzzFeed News has been sharing submitted obituaries, but again these capture such a small total of those who’ve died and put the burden on those forced to grieve away from loved ones to memorialize the people they've lost. That I can't recall (off the top of my head, anyway) a Canadian example of similar attempts is as unsurprising in the face of this numbness as it is disappointing.

There is a lot about this pandemic that we can't control, especially as individuals, but if you're reading this you have the power to choose your words carefully. In fact, I would argue we each have the responsibility to choose our words carefully to respect and protect our fellow humans. Words mean things. Choose yours carefully.

I'm not the first to cover this issue, so if you're looking for further reading:

This article from a group in the UK also notes how the war metaphor can affect social programs.
This piece from Lancaster University refers to a movement to avoid the war metaphor when talking about COVID-19, and there's even a crowd-sourced Google Sheet of examples of alternative metaphors/phrases.
This piece from India Spend includes an excellent interview with a psychologist on this subject.
And this Scientific American blog post is directly from a doctor who objects to the metaphor, if you think only word nerds care about these kinds of things.
Special credit to Azi, AKA The Wellness Therapist, who was the first person I saw mention this and got me thinking about it.