As the COVID-19 threat seemingly fades, a new and much more insidious pandemic has arisen to take its place: Zoom-itis aka the Zoomdemic aka Zoomaggedon. Rapidly contagious though it is, N95 masks are wholly ineffective and unnecessary against #Zoomitis – sorry Dr. Fauci! – since social distancing is already implied – except perhaps to hide cold sores and other skin blemishes that may stand out on camera.
Telltale, pathognomonic signs and symptoms of the disease, which inevitably arises from the non-stop Zoom calls that still fill our days, even after the subsidence of COVID-19, tends to progress in stages, and may enter a latent phase, are:
- severely hating the sight of one’s own face coupled with an inability to look away
- rotator cuff strain from frantic, overexaggerated arm-waving gestures at the end of every call, as shown below
- extreme wardrobe dissonance – aka “mullet attire” aka business above, party down below – from the pairing of a professional top with sweatpants and fuzzy slippers
- facial pain from over-the-top smiles like this
- giving off serious serial killer vibes when the façade and the smile drop immediately after the Zoom call ends, like these examples below.
The much milder variants of Zoom-itis are get-out-of-bed-itis, go-to-the-office-itis, meeting-itis, webinar-itis, LinkedIn-itis, and email-itis. Because these several forme fruste variants tend to appear most often on Mondays, they may exacerbate a pre-existing case of Monday-itis, which we have previously blogged about and, which most major health plans, unfortunately, do not cover even though immediate medical and psychological attention is required to effectively treat it.
The same is true with Zoom-itis, an often more ambiguous, protean, virulent, and potentially harder-to-diagnose affliction, depending on the organ systems affected, than #Mondayitis. For those unfortunate individuals with the worst cases of Zoom-itis, group therapy and specialist referrals sound like excellent ideas, which we would happily recommend and advocate for, the sooner the better, in fact – provided, of course, that these therapy sessions take place in person and not on Zoom!