Schools have been shut down, kids are still at home in many countries, many citizens are now working remotely, locked down in their houses, and leaving only for reasons of primary necessity, such as shopping for groceries and going to medical appointments.
The virus has so far spread throughout all the inhabited continents and affected millions of people, killing thousands of individuals. SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus responsible for this coronavirus pandemic that we are experiencing while the present article was in writing. Since then, the disease has spread quickly throughout China, and from there to the rest of the world.
The next day, the Huanan seafood market was closed, because it was suspected to be the source of the unknown disease, as some of the patients presenting with the pneumonia-like illness were dealers or vendors at that market. The cause, they initially said, was unknown, and the disease was first referred to as 2019-nCoV and then named COVID-19. On December 31, 2019, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization of pneumonia cases in Wuhan City, within the Hubei province in China. Therefore, we conclude, in line with previous suggestions, a plethora of framing options-or a metaphor menu-may facilitate the communication of various aspects involved in the Covid-19-related discourse on the social media, and thus support civilians in the expression of their feelings, opinions and beliefs during the current pandemic. Yet, this frame does not seem to be apt to elaborate the discourse around some aspects involved in the current situation. The results show that while the FAMILY frame covers a wider portion of the corpus, among the figurative frames WAR, a highly conventional one, is the frame used most frequently. We then measure and compare the popularity of the WAR frame to three alternative figurative frames (MONSTER, STORM and TSUNAMI) and a literal frame used as control (FAMILY). Then, we show that the WAR framing is used to talk about specific topics, such as the virus treatment, but not others, such as the effects of social distancing on the population. Using topic modelling we first analyze the topics around which the discourse can be classified. We hereby present an analysis of the discourse around #Covid-19, based on a large corpus tweets posted on Twitter during March and April 2020. The discourse around the current epidemic makes use of war-related metaphors too, not only in public discourse and in the media, but also in the tweets written by non-experts of mass communication. War-related terminology is commonly used to frame the discourse around epidemics and diseases. Cities are locked down and civilians are besieged in their own homes, to prevent the spreading of the virus. Doctors and nurses in these weeks and months are busy in the trenches, fighting against a new invisible enemy: Covid-19.
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