Is ‘Epicenter’ the Wrong Word for New York?

As the country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a busy man these days. But on Friday afternoon, he squeezed in a phone call – as he was walking into the White House to attend the signing of the coronavirus relief bill – to answer a quick question about a single word: “epicenter.”

Critics have emerged recently to say that “epicenter” is the wrong way to talk about wherever the current Covid-19 hotspot is. Experts and journalists alike have been using it widely – first for the emergence of the disease in Wuhan, China; then for the tragic outbreak in northern Italy; and now for New York, the most overwhelmed city in the U.S. (Typical headlines: “Why New York is the epicenter of the American coronavirus outbreak,” or “In Italy’s coronavirus epicenter, life is on hold.”)

It’s not just journalists. The World Health Organization’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has done it, speaking back in January about “managing the epidemic at the epicenter” in China, and then again in mid-March when he explained that “Europe is the epicenter of the first pandemic of COVID-19.”

There are good reasons people use “epicenter”: It’s a dramatic and scientific-sounding word, with strong echoes of disaster, and it captures people’s attention.

But there are also reasons not to use it. The first round of complaints about “epicenter” argued that it’s simply incorrect: In its original meaning, an “epicenter” isn’t technically the middle of anything. Despite having the same prefix as “epidemic,” it originated in seismology, not health, to pinpoint the spot on the earth’s surface directly above the focus of an earthquake. (“Epi-” is from the Greek root for “above, upon.”) The real center of an earthquake is far below, but seismologists needed a term to describe the spot on the surface, hence the new word.

Its metaphorical use is nearly as old as the word itself: The earliest use of “epicenter” documented by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1880, but it was already getting extended for other centers of activity by 1908, when The Japan Weekly Mail referred to “the epicentre of the world’s sea-power.”

This semantic shift has long bothered some language observers. In 2001, William Safire quoted a geophysicist in his New York Times “On Language” column as saying that the expanded use of “epicenter” is “attributable to spurious erudition on the part of the writers combined with scientific illiteracy on the part of copy editors.” One recent letter writer in the Washington Post, complaining about the paper’s coronavirus coverage, bemoaned that “the battle to stop the misuse of ‘epicenter’ may be a lost cause.”

But to insist that “epicenter” should only ever refer to earthquakes is falling prey to the etymological fallacy, like insisting that “decimate” can only mean “to reduce by one tenth.” The meanings of words transform over time whether we like it or not, even ones originally defined with scientific precision. Epicenter has a long history as a dramatic way to capture the way power, or destruction, can radiate from one place—and a viral disaster is just the latest way it has proven useful.

But there’s a different and more forward-looking critique that I wanted to ask Fauci about. An epidemic is a huge human catastrophe that affects many places all at once; now that it’s taken hold, it doesn’t just radiate outward. It could easily sweep through big cities, spread elsewhere, and then bounce back in a long and deadly back-and-forth. It’s more like a network than an earthquake, and that means it’s not just Wuhan or New York’s problem to stop: it’s everyone’s at once.

Nick Montfort, a professor of digital media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently wrote a blog post arguing that the word “leads us to think about the current global pandemic in some unhelpful ways.” The word’s metaphorical mapping may lead people to think they need only be concerned with what is happening in the immediate surroundings of an “epicenter,” on the model of how seismic waves radiate from an earthquake.

“Do we need to be concerned about the center but, if we are somewhere on the margins, is it okay to have parties or get into other situations that may foster transmission of the virus?” Montfort asked. “Is that the way to think about a global pandemic, where outbreaks are occurring everywhere?”

In other words, using a word created for another kind of disaster might actually hurt our response to this one. Disease experts have started to worry about this. I checked in with Alison Galvani, a professor of epidemiology at Yale University, who felt that such terminological concerns are warranted. “I think the problem with ‘epicenter’ is a connotation that there a singular location that is seeding cases to the rest of the world,” she told me. “It is particularly problematic if it leads to a sense that control measures are only necessary at the ‘epicenter.’” The entire country should be exercising caution and limiting interaction as far as possible.”

As an alternative term for “epicenter,” Galvani suggested talking about “case clusters,” though she acknowledged that could sound a bit clinical. She added that “hot spots,” while relying on a different type of metaphor, would be preferable, since it could still catch the attention of the public without being potentially misleading.

So how about Washington’s top infectious-disease fighter? When I reached Fauci, with decades of experience fighting, and talking to the public about, viral epidemics, he acknowledged “epicenter” wasn’t exactly precise. “[I]n our determination to try to describe things that are happening, we might use terms that in a semantic way might not be specifically accurate,” he told me. But he defended the use of the word “epicenter,” noting that he has relied on the term himself.

“It refers to that point in a particular region where the most activity is,” he said. “For instance, in Northern Italy when things started to explode, the city of Bergamo got hit disproportionately hard.” Now “epicenter” has been transferred to New York City, the source of more than half of the country’s new infections in recent days.

Dr. Fauci mused on the different labels that could be used. “Is it the ‘focus’? Is it the ‘major point of acceleration’? Is it the ‘epicenter’? It’s the most prominent area with an outbreak,” he said. “I don’t see any harm in using common terms. There’s always room for misunderstanding, but as long as it isn’t so confusing for people to understand, I have no problem with saying ‘epicenter.’”

And with that terse and reassuring analysis, Dr. Fauci signed off and made his way into the White House.