Ian McEwan: The strange vocabulary of coronavirus

The vocabulary of Brexit has passed into oblivion. Now there’s fresh work to be done. We all know about ‘flattening the curve’, but are you comfortable yet with ‘fomite’, a word my older son, a virologist, taught the family early on? It’s an object or surface on which an infectious agent like a coronavirus might be lying in wait — just for you. A cheque in the post, next door’s cat, the tennis balls you are about to double-fault with — all good candidates. You knew that already. Then how about ‘lipid envelope’, the outer shell of certain viruses. We learn with relief that the envelope of our coronavirus of concern is easily destroyed by soap and water. More good news: this virus has a genome made of single-stranded RNA that’s far larger or longer than most — 30,000 bases. Viruses mutate randomly at astonishing speed. But this one has to preserve the stability of its unwieldy genome and can’t easily chance upon some even nastier version of itself.