Epidemic vs. Pandemic: What's in a Name?

Pandemic probably tops the long list of new words added to our vocabulary in 2020, but before it earned that notoriety, covid-19 was classified as an epidemic in Wuhan, China. It was only in March 2020 that WHO upgraded it to a pandemic -- far deadlier and more widespread than an epidemic. What's in a name, you ask? Merriam Webster defines an epidemic as a disease affecting a large number of individuals within a population, community, or region at the same time; a pandemic is an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people, according to the WHO.

Not surprisingly, both words are derived from ancient Greek. Pandemic comes from the Greek word pandemos, based on pan meaning "all" + demos meaning "people" or "population"; pandemic therefore affects nearly all of the people. In contrast, epi means "upon," so epidemic is something visited upon the people.

What is interesting is that the word epidemos is very old, used by the likes of Homer, but its meaning was not quite the same as we know it today. Homer used the word epidemic in the Odyssey to mean "of home or the people." It was Hippocrates who first associated it with medicine, when he started writing his treatise on infectious diseases, Epidemics. It is not clear why he chose that particular word as his book's title, but in it he described a collection of syndromes such as coughs and fever, occurring frequently in a given location at the same time. In his treatise, Hippocrates used the adjective epidemio which means "on the people," which led to the noun epidemia, and the word soon came to be associated with diseases that affect a large population of a place.

Hippocrates' Epidemics II

In Epidemics, Hippocrates described the Cough of Perinthus, which affected large populations in the town of Perinthus in the winter. He describes an upper respiratory tract infection very similar to the modern influenza (flu). Imagine that, the humble flu is the first recorded epidemic in human history!

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3373038/
https://www.schoyencollection.com/24-smaller-collections/medical-texts/hippocrates-epidemics-ms-2634-3

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