In the words of the seemingly unkillable Meredith Grey of the long-running hit medical drama ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ “There is no other day. Every day is like this. Every day there’s a crisis. There’s no time. (1)” Arguably, Dr Grey’s life is more chaotic than your average real-life human (in this episode, she is getting married to her boss while Friend #1 battles metastatic cancer and Friend #2 joins the military and is subsequently hit by a bus), but hey, life imitates art.
My point is, the natural evolution of the term “crisis” into mainstream English, in conjunction with popular media having far greater access to an arsenal of attention-grabbing tools than it did in the 17th century, means that there is plenty of debate over what constitutes a crisis. Koselleck specifically mentions the legal/political, medical, and theological definitions of the word. The legal/political positioning refers to a major decision or event that affects the community, in line with the original Greek “krisis,” while the medical term generally encompasses a turning-point between life or death in an illness. The theological definition furthers the turning-point idea to invoke the Last Judgement for a sprinkling of added drama (2). 
As of 6:10 PM on the 19th of February, 2021, this is what Google shows me when I search the word “crisis” under the News tab. I’ll be honest and say I’m not sure how Google’s tracking policy works, or whether the results are influenced by my search history, but regardless, that’s a solid variety of topics and platforms that the term appears on.
This begs the question of whether there is a need for such a specific definition of the word. This is not an argument for it to be allowed to lose all meaning, but Dr. Uta Staiger pointed out that language changes and moves over time, and unlike crisis’ medical definition as a clear turning-point with a before and an after, language can shift gradually. It may be slow, but it is not static, and for a term so deeply entrenched in almost every area of society that involves any sort of problem at all, even while we try to define its immediate meaning, it continues to shift before our eyes. Additionally, because it is already so part of common English and no longer used as a technical term, maybe the process of determining its significance at this point in time can only be carried out by examining our present day in hindsight, as a point of historical exploration.
References:
- Rhimes S. Grey’s Anatomy, Season 5, Episode 24, Timestamp 31:50. Los Angeles: ABC Studios; 2021.
- Koselleck R, Richter M. Crisis. Journal of the History of Ideas [Internet]. 2006 [cited 19 February 2021];67(2):357-400. Available from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30141882?seq=1