Learn the Lingo

New terms you might hear in the days to come

Blanket testing: Testing everybody in a region, whether or not they show symptoms. In an isolated northern Italian village of 3,000 people, blanket testing led the number of people with coronavirus symptoms to drop by 90% in 10 days, reports an Italian academic in the journal BMJ. Everyone with a positive result was quarantined. (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member of the White House coronavirus task force, says the U.S. needs help from the private sector to do the same.)

Attack rate: The proportion of people who get sick after an exposure. Experts warn that the attack rate in the New York area is one in 1,000 — five times higher than elsewhere in the United States, according to the New York Times.

Immune enhancement or disease enhancement: When people who get a vaccine and are infected end up with a more severe form of the disease than people who don’t get the vaccine. This is why vaccine testing before human use is so important. As Nature points out, avoiding dangerous outcomes like immune enhancement must be a priority, even though the pressure is on to find a vaccine ASAP.