Week 14 of lockdown has come and gone. How did that happen?

Remote working is hard. Remote working is tricky. This isn’t regular remote working!

Remote working is going to the shops to grab some lunch. Remote working is taking your laptop to a coffee shop or pub for an hour for a change of scenery. None of this is what we are currently doing. Remote working has flexibility. I hope this type of change will come again soon.

The phrases which are now every day vocabulary have got me thinking. When did “social distancing”, “shielding” and “self isolation” become every day terms? Now I’d imagine the last two have been used for medical reasons for many years. A cancer patient after a course of chemo may need to sheild themselves while they recover. But “social distancing” everyone knows it means “don’t hug people and stay 2 meters away” but who coined the term?

Doing some searching on wikipedia apparently it was originally documented there by the user Cmacauley and the first revision of the “social distancing” page was done in 2017. This led me to find a link to an interesting pdf which talks social distancing when a pandemic starts. So like the other phrases the term has been around for a reasonable time, just it’s never cropped up in every day life until the specific scenario reared it’s ugly head.

Stay home, keep safe!