Histori Personale

My name is Kovid, but I'm not a virus

My name is Kovid, but I'm not a virus

Ordering a coffee at Starbucks, booking a hotel or showing off his passport at the airport would never be the same again.

Kovid Kapoor, from Bangalore, India realized from the first moment that the World Health Organization announced the official name for the disease caused by the new coronavirus: Covid-19.

He is not the only one in the world who bears this name and whose life has changed.

The pandemic has radically changed the lives of people who share the same name with the virus. And many of the Covids are tired of joking. Some have even come together on social media, forming a network among themselves to discuss and complain about their shared experiences of being surprised or teased by name by different people.

In fact their name, until before the pandemic, had no bad meaning. It means "Scholar", ie a knowledgeable person.

Kapoor humorously wrote on Twitter that he was a 'positive covet since 1990' - when he was born. With the same humor he got the very attentive and surprised look of the passport from the employees at the airport on his first trip since the pandemic, to Sri Lanka.

He also remembers the Washington Post the day his friends ordered a cake for his 30th birthday and the pastry chef wrote: "Happy Birthday # Covid-30". Then they apologized and gave him another cake.

"Life threw me (and all the rest of us) a sour lemon. I decided to take it with humor and make a lemonade with it. "The funny and at the same time sad part is that there will be many more such cases in the future, I believe for the rest of my life," he wrote on Twitter.

When the head of the World Health Organization named the new virus, in February 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that experts had taken many issues into consideration.

"We had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or a group of people and that is also articulate in different languages ​​and related to the disease," he said.

However, the WHO did not spare this particular group of people.

Corona beer was one of the first to be affected.

My name is Kovid, but I'm not a virus

Kapoor's friends photographed him holding a beer bottle in his hand and posted it on social media with the caption: "Hey look, this is Covid holding a crown in his hand."