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The DOI matches its Crossref record; 31 of the 31 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

“Not Soldiers but Fire-fighters” – Metaphors and Covid-19

Open access
Semino, Elena·2021·Health Communication

Abstract

Metaphors have been widely used in communication about the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus has been described, for example, as an "enemy" to be "beaten," a "tsunami" on health services and even as "glitter" that "gets everywhere." This paper discusses different metaphors for the pandemic, and explains why they are used and why they matter. War metaphors are considered first, as they were particularly frequent and controversial at the beginning of the pandemic. An overview of alternative metaphors is then provided, drawing from the "#ReframeCovid" crowd-sourced multilingual collection of metaphors for Covid-19. Finally, based on both the #ReframeCovid collection and a systematic analysis of a large corpus of news articles in English, it is suggested that Fire metaphors are particularly appropriate and versatile in communication about different aspects of the pandemic, including contagion and different public health measures aimed at reducing it.

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Metadata

Authors
Semino, E.
Venue
Health Communication
Published
2020-11-10
Volume
36
Issue
1
Pages
50-58
ISSN
  • 1041-0236 (ISSN-L)
  • 1532-7027
OpenAlex
W3097127210
Cited by
412
References
31
FWCI
377.45
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: “Not Soldiers but Fire-fighters” – Metaphors and Covid-19. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1080/10410236.2020.1844989
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Semino, E. (2021). “Not Soldiers but Fire-fighters” – Metaphors and Covid-19. Health Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2020.1844989

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.