The article considers the main tendencies in the development of the abbreviation system of the modern German language occurring under the influence of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It describes the main models of the abbreviated lexical unit's formation: initial, syllabic abbreviations, partially abbreviated words, simple and complicated truncations, telescopic formations, and mixed forms of abbreviations. The article also specifies the use of abbreviations in the pandemic discourse. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main functions performed by various types of abbreviations in German media texts covering the topic of coronavirus. Some aspects of the operation of the law of language economy are considered, the specifics of the functioning of medical abbreviations are revealed, and the stylistic potential of abbreviations is analyzed. The source of the linguistic material is the corpus presented in the online dictionary of pandemic neologisms of Leibniz Institute for the German Language, and texts of the German Internet media. The methodological basis of the study is cognitive word formation. A descriptive method, methods of component and contextual analysis are used. The study proved the high degree of adaptation in the language of neologism abbreviations and their word-formation activity. The stylistic functions of abbreviations are mainly to express an assessment or to soften a statement. It is emphasized that the use of abbreviations within the framework of pandemic discourse is an effective way to introduce lexemes from highly specialized areas and international lexical units into general use. This greatly contributes to increasing the communication effectiveness.