'Kofit' is the general Common word for a disparate group of respiratory illnesses including the common cold, influenza and, of course, covid, the disease that lent its name to the Common word. It's a little known fact today, but covid itself is a fairly new disease, the first outbreak in humans having been less than a hundred years ago. With the many global pandemics that have racked the world in the last century, the several major outbreaks of covid have somewhat faded into the background, but it was at one time a very feared disease and may have played a unique role in the first formative event of the 21st century, the Global Financial Collapse.

Origin and Etymology

The word 'covid' actually comes from the acronym COVID, from 'coronavirus disease', because the illness is caused by a few closely related members of a larger family of viruses called coronaviruses. While various diseases caused by coronaviruses, including the common cold, have been with humanity for centuries, there were several major zoonotic leaps (transfer from animals to humans) that happened in the 21st century as human encroachment on natural habitats increased. A couple of early 21st century outbreaks were associated with 'wet markets' in China, where wild animals were brought together and sold as food, creating ideal conditions for zoonotic transfer.

The first disease dubbed 'COVID' by the World Health Organisation (WHO) was the first major deadly pandemic of the 21st century, COVID-23, so called because it was first detected in 2023. There was one other major disease designated in this fashion, COVID-27, a mutation of COVID-23, before the WHO became essentially defunct around 2030.

There have been many fevered conspiracy theories about the origin of covid, especially at the time, but the scientific consensus is that COVID-23 was of completely natural origins, probably making the jump into people in a 'wet market' in Wuhan, China. Based on genetic analysis, it appears to have originated in bats and then transferred from bats to pangolins to manatees to rattlesnakes before making the final leap into humans.

Covid and various mutations quickly became an endemic disease of humans, and in English the name eventually evolved to 'covid', as we are familiar with today. In English the word 'covid' generally refers only to covid disease, with flu referring to influenza and 'cold' referring to any other usually-mild respiratory illness.

The path in Common was a little different. It entered Common from English as 'covid', but this was problematic in Common because 'v' and 'd' are both non-standard letters, and 'c' is being used with a non-standard /k/ sound instead of the standard /t͡ʃ/ sound.

The first mutation was the resolution between a spelling pronunciation of /'t͡ʃo.vit/ versus the English phonetic approximation /ko.vit/, which is what everyone actually said. The latter won out and the spelling quickly shifted to 'kovid'. In the early modern period, the AXZ recommended a regularised spelling as 'kofit', and this form quickly took over, because with two irregular letters, it was a lot easier to type 'kofit' than 'kovid' on the new Common-specific keyboards. Occasionally, mixed forms like 'kofid' or 'kovit' were seen for a while.

Today, Common speakers have no inkling that this is a non-native word. In addition, its meaning has broadened to serve essentially as a general word for the whole somewhat similar class of diseases which are primarily known for various respiratory symptoms. The following table illustrates how the terminology works in Common.

The origin of 'niflu' for 'influenza' is obscure, but it appears to be an attempt to make the illegal consonant cluster in 'influenza' pronounceable through metathesis, and in fact is the official, technical word for 'influenza' in Common. It is used in ordinary speech as well, but it is very common for it to be conflated with covid and the word 'kofit' used instead.

History

The original COVID-23 was the first great pandemic of the 21st century. It was a completely novel disease that no human alive had immunity to, and it was especially deadly, much more deadly than it is today, although of course even today a lot of people die from it every other year as new strains arise that the current vaccine doesn't cover.

The way it presented in late 2023 and early 2024, it was at least twice as contagious as the flu. It had a long incubation period and it could spread asymptomatically. While 80% of patients presented with relatively mild or even no symptoms, roughly 15% percent of patients required hospitalisation, and a further 5% required extended, severe medical interventions such as being placed on a ventilator. Estimates of the death rates vary, but the post facto epidemiological research suggests that the fatality rate was 1-3% of diagnosed cases in functioning healthcare systems and as high as 12% in overwhelmed or collapsed healthcare systems. Just as today, covid did not exhibit the seasonal variation of the flu and spread consistently year-round.

The modern public health response when covid or other epidemic diseases are detected is extensive testing, quarantine and contact tracing, treating the victims with immunoregulators and antivirals, and accelerated vaccine production. When COVID-23 struck in the early 21st century, effective immunoregulators and antivirals barely existed. The then brand-new genetic vaccine technology was able to make an effective vaccine within mere months, but severe supply chain issues and political strife meant that significant vaccine rollouts were not seen until as late as 2025, when the Global Financial Collapse again threw vaccine production and distribution into disarray - essentially, vaccination played a limited role in combatting the first covid pandemic.

Testing capacity took two to six months to fully build up depending on the jurisdiction. The public health response was generally slow, and many countries did not take it seriously at first, allowing the disease to get out of control before trying to seriously address it. A few such as China and South Korea were able to contain the outbreak relatively quickly, but most countries didn't have strong cultures of public health compliance at the time, and the learning curve proved deadly, as much as the citizenry in many countries actively resisted measures needed to curb the disease.

The global impacts are a very large topic, but suffice it to say that some countries actually managed to fare decently, at least in the first year, when only considering the rate of infection and death and ignoring the considerable economic damage, which was global, and others were devastated in a matter of months. But from the point of view of the arguable contribution to the Global Financial Collapse and ultimately the Global Collapse as a whole, the impact on the United States was particularly important.

The first covid case detected in the United States was on 20 January 2024. President Donald Trump Sr. had died in office in late 2022, and his Vice President, President Sean Hannity, was left to face the challenge.

The old American political system was extremely complicated and quite different than the British system, but to attempt to explain the situation simply, the United States was still nominally a multi-party democracy, but in reality it was fully under the control of the Trump regime's Republican party and there were no effective challengers.

So who would become the next President of the United States hinged not on the formality of the election scheduled for November 2024, but on the results of the Republican 'primary election', a gruelling, months-long contest of separate state mini-elections to determine the Presidential nominee for the ruling Republicans. Hannity was facing a strong challenge from President Trump Sr.'s son, Donald Trump Jr. and the fight was extremely vitriolic and bitter even by the low standards of the time.

President Hannity needed to rise to the challenge of covid in order to beat back the challenge from Trump Jr. Suffice it to say that he did not. After nearly eight years of the Trump regime and the catastrophic and precipitous erosion of American democracy and public institutions, it is fair to say that America was beginning to come apart at the seams.

The incompetent and corrupt central government could not effectively rally the country against the threat, and President Hannity tried to address the problem in the critical early months by denying it even existed, up to and including the imprisonment and murder of journalists who attempted to report on the outbreak. This response gave covid the opportunity to spread out of control before the weak, inconsistent and patchwork response kicked in against a backdrop of pervasive misinformation, ongoing political violence and civil unrest.

In evaluating the aftermath, epidemiologists said that the outbreak in United States was most comparable to that in failed states like Syria than in developed nations. Public health directives were erratic and compliance was poor. An estimated 218 million Americans contracted covid over the first year of the pandemic in the United States. The death toll is estimated at 8 to 12 million people, which may not seem like a lot, but in those days was a staggering, unprecedented number. While the reported death rate at the peak of the epidemic was about 12% of diagnosed cases, of course most cases were not diagnosed and the scientific estimate of the death rate based on analysis of excess mortality in the United States is around 5% of infections. This figure does not just include people who died directly of covid but also mortality from other causes attributable to the collapse of the US healthcare system.

The Republican party cancelled the primary elections, and the nominee was determined at an in-person party convention in August in the trough in infection rates between the first peak in May and the second peak in November. Donald Trump Jr. handily won the nomination, as the 'establishment' Republicans who tended to support Hannity mostly stayed away for fear of contracting covid, and Trump was better able to get out his supporters. Trump went on to easily win the general election in November, winning over 90% of the vote in the states where the elections weren't cancelled due to the imposition of martial law, although historians questions the validity of the reported results in those states where the election was held.

The epidemic in the United States had a shorter peak than countries that enacted public health measures to try and slow the pandemic and prevent their healthcare systems from being overwhelmed, but the country was ultimately much more economically damaged than other large economies after the first year, and of course covid remained endemic, just as it is today, due to the temporary nature of covid immunity.

The appearance of covid has been overshadowed and forgotten for most modern people, eclipsed by the wars, civil unrest and governmental collapse that happened around and after that time that the history books like to focus on. However, arguably, covid was an important factor in both the timing and progression of the Financial Collapse in particular and the Global Collapse as a whole. We forget that in that era, millions of people dying in a pandemic had not become routine, and the experience was deeply shocking to the people at the time, who seemed to struggle for months to even believe what was happening.

The covid epidemic and the response to try and control it plunged the world into an economic depression, which brought the growing weakness of the American-led global financial system into stark focus. Without covid, Donald Trump Jr. might not have become President, and perhaps his disastrous decisions that collapsed the global financial system, to default on the US national debt and to order the Federal Reserve to print over a quadrillion dollars to try and stimulate the United States out of the crisis, might not have happened or might have happened differently.

As well, the catastrophically disorganised global response to the pandemic gave the Globalists an additional, powerful argument about the suicidal ineffectiveness of the nation-state system, which they marshalled in their early attempts to achieve dominance and which at the time may have seemed much more compelling than the core Globalist arguments about war and environmental catastrophe - in some small way, covid might even be responsible for the New World Order itself!

In conclusion, there is arguably a lot of fateful history packed into this one little ordinary and unassuming word!