Beginning January through mid-March 2020, global quarantine measures were taken in response to the spread of the novel Coronavirus around the world.  This is perhaps the only time in recorded history when nearly all nations around the world took some form of collective action for the protection of human kind. The global response creates a unique kind of opportunity to ask a unique question: how does the intersection of culture, politics, and rhetoric reveals itself as words when every country agrees on the nature of the problem?

Around the world, speeches were delivered by national leaders addressing how daily life and laws would suddenly need to change. These viral word clouds came from those first speeches.  To date, I have created wordclouds from 17 official English transcripts. I was motivated to ask how how one speech might have influenced another over time, as more knowledge about virus was became known?  How are national values reflected in the words of their leaders?  Which words best express a cooperative relationship between humans and the natural (viral) world? Which ones express concerns for one another?  Ecology? Society? Mutual aid? Collaboration?  In light of new scientific discoveries about Sociovirology - the secret social life of viruses.  What are the ways their social behavior might influence our own?