War Metaphors during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

No sooner had the coronavirus pandemic begun in the Chinese city of Wuhan and spread to Europe and the rest of the world, than mass media and politicians began to use war metaphors to represent the sanitary emergency, which ended up with the imposition of restrictions and lockdowns. This was not the first time that war metaphors had been used in relation to health: in 1971, Nixon used the metaphor of the “war on cancer” to indicate the commitment of research against tumours. It is therefore not surprising that metaphors have been used to define the crisis of COVID-19. But why, among all metaphors, were those inspired by war used? Are they appropriate to describe the pandemic? What effect did they produce? This chapter addresses these questions by analysing the metaphors that appeared between March and April 2020 in newspapers and broadcast companies in Italy (la Repubblica, Il Mattino, La Stampa, Corriere della sera, Il Messaggero, ANSA and RAI), France (Le Monde, Le Figaro and Le Quotidien du médecin), Spain (El Mundo and Redacción médica), Germany (Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung and RND), UK (BBC, The Times and The Guardian) and the United States (The New York Times).