The ‘quad-demic’ is here – and with it I have become a disease detective | Zoe Williams

Neologisms may have the excitement of the strange, but there is nothing exciting about the “quad-demic” if you’re afflicted by it. Even if the idea of getting out of a load of events is thrilling to you, you would still prefer to have a cold, or maybe sprain your ankle, than get any of the quartet: flu, Covid, respiratory syncytial virus or norovirus.

Nevertheless, with warnings of a “tidal wave” of disease this winter, any time anyone is ill, I want to know where on the quad they would put themselves. And people are ill everywhere you look, which is, I guess, why they’re calling it a “quad-demic”. It’s not, particularly in the case of norovirus, any of my business. It takes studied restraint to stop me drilling in for symptoms.

And still I launch endless inquisitions about what it might be, what the person thinks it is, all my inquiries completely untested clinically. Have they taken a Covid test, I want to know (and this is often by email; it’s not because I think they’re going to infect me, unless they can do that remotely). Have they ever had flu before? If so, does it feel anything like that time? Do they have an itch at the back of their nose, which could apply to any of the respiratory three and could also apply to someone who isn’t ill. Do they know who they think they got it off? What did that person think it was?

I wonder whether it’s a post-pandemic effect, a lingering superstition, that if there are infections in the air, you should keep yourself constantly apprised of who has what, even if those are just guesses. I could be doing something useful, such as washing my hands, but instead I’m asking whether the headache came first or there have been any bone-shaking chills. I’m making like some kind of “quad-demic” symptom-tracking app, rather than the gross amateur I am. And it prompts the question: why am I collecting all this data when I have nothing useful to do with it?