March 12, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich

Metaphors, covid and communication

There is a great event happening this evening (12 March 2025) at UCL about “Communicating in a Crisis: Lessons Learned Five Years After Covid” with wonderful speakers. As I won’t be able to be there or to participate remotely, I thought I’d quickly highlight a few things about covid and metaphors, a topic that has something to do with communication but might not be covered by the event.

When the pandemic started I began collecting metaphors and have written about covid/ corona/ coronavirus metaphors throughout the pandemic.

I wrote a lot of blog posts, three book chapters and a special issue. Here I just want to highlight one book chapter that’s not available online but might be quite important.

It’s not surprising that I observed that war metaphors were prevalent at the time, especially in the early stages of the pandemic. Political leaders, particularly male leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, frequently used war-related language to describe the pandemic response. This included phrases like “invisible enemy,” “combating the threat,” and “defending the city”.

I argued that metaphors are powerful tools that can shape our understanding and responses to crises, and while metaphors can help create and expand knowledge, they can also distort understanding and communication. War metaphors, in particular, can drive people apart and destroy shared understandings of what it means to be human. 

I suggested that alternative metaphors could be more beneficial, especially ecologically inspired metaphors that highlight empathy, interdependence, equity, and resilience and metaphors focusing on care for people rather than control over the virus. I noted that while war metaphors dominated early pandemic discourse, alternative frames and metaphors emerged over time, particularly in countries that emphasised care over control.

I explored how pandemic metaphors may have exacerbated existing inequalities or created new divisions and I advocated for careful consideration of metaphor use, especially during times of crisis, to promote a more just, inclusive, and sustainable society.

I think all this is now more important than ever, especially in times of political, scientific and potentially pandemic (H5N1) crisis.

As the eighteenth-century philosopher and wit Georg C. Lichtenberg remarked, ”We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on” (Lichtenberg, 1990: Aphorism 91) and this is even more true for bad metaphors. I know that one of the speakers this evening, Jonathan van Tam, was a bit of a wizard with metaphors during the crisis and I hope he’ll talk about that.

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