What about ridethetalk's suggestion of
rona?
This contraction bobbed its head up quite early. In April 2020 a
PC Gamer editor reported
Here in Australia people are calling isolation "iso" and coronavirus "the rona" because there's nothing we won't abbreviate.
In September 2020 psychologist Roger J Kreutz had an article in
The Conversation, "How COVID-19 is changing the English language". Discussing the OED's updates to incorporate Covid-related words and phrases, he noted that:
"Rona" or "the rona" as slang for coronavirus has been observed in the U.S. and Australia, but the dictionary editors haven't documented wide enough usage to warrant its inclusion.
Rona is still absent from the OED, but Dictionary.com and Wiktionary have both added it. The
Wiktionary entry gives several usage examples, from March 2020 onwards. From my own scanning of newspaper usage, it seems the word is most often written with an apostrophe at the beginning. However the apostrophe is not always used.
We could ask, as perhaps the lexicographers at the OED did, whether this colloquial term might prove to be ephemeral, but our Chi lexicon already includes plenty of dated colloquialisms. And the word has already found its way into one or two book titles, such as
The Rona: A True Story about Getting Covid 19 (2021), by Asha V Ntim.
I'll add
rona as a rare word.
