2. microCOVID

Thanks for helping out! Please try to follow these guidelines in the translations, if possible.

The core principles of our “style” and “voice” are:

• Consequences and opinions, not commands. (We are not authorities.)
  • ✅ “If you wear a mask, you pose 1/4 as much risk to others. For more details on masks, see research sources.”
  • ✅ “We recommend wearing a mask.” “Consider wearing a mask.”
  • ✅ “We choose to wear masks.” “In the authors’ house, we wear masks.”
  • ⛔️ “You need to wear a mask”, “You should wear a mask”
  • ⛔️ “It’s irresponsible not to wear a mask”, “If you don’t wear a mask, you might kill someone”
• Use simple language if technical precision is not necessary.
  • ✅ new information will emerge about the riskiness of various activities
  • ⛔️ new information will emerge about Activity Risk and its modifiers
  • If technical precision is helpful, use specific terms, consistently and precisely.
  • ✅ The positive test rate was 4.3%, so we’ll use a 6x underreporting factor.
  • ⛔️ There were 4.3% of the tests that were positive so we multiply by 6.
• Point to where “facts” come from: to our work, or to trustworthy sources
  • ✅ If you wear a mask, you pose 1/4 as much risk to others. For more details on masks, see research sources.
  • ✅ COVID is transmitted primarily through tiny droplets produced when an infected person talks, coughs, or sneezes (CDC FAQ)
  • ⛔️ If you wear a mask, you pose 1/4 as much risk to others. [no link or explanation of where this came from]. (Sometimes this can be omitted if the context is very obvious, such as when email replying to a calculator user, who can find all the links on the calculator page).
• Own our perspective
  • Our and others’ active role in the knowledge-making process:
  • ✅ “We assume”, “We think”, “We choose”, “We calculate”
  • ✅ “We believe with 90% confidence...”
  • ⛔️ “It’s 90% certain that...”
• Our privilege
  • ✅ “For people in the authors’ demographics, 1% risk of COVID per year is a plausible choice.”
  • ⛔️ “Everyone should stay home.” (some people work essential jobs).
  • ⛔️ “1% risk per year is safe.” (some people are more vulnerable to severe illness)

If you don’t know exactly how we usually describe something, check our existing language for how it is described. (Such as the white paper, especially the sections before the Q&A and the Research Sources, which got more intense copyediting)

For example, we generally say: - microCOVID (not some other capitalization, and usually not the abbreviation µCoV unless saving space is important) - COVID (instead of SARS-CoV-2, even if we mean the virus, this is explained in a footnote. COVID-19 is fine but the -19 isn’t needed) - We describe people with underlying medical conditions as “vulnerable” or “vulnerable to severe illness from COVID”, rather than “at high risk”, to avoid using “risk” to mean something other than “chance” or “probability”.

We will try to add the most important terms to the glossary for the given language.