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comment by kingmudsy
kingmudsy  ·  1733 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus

Seems like such an arbitrary pseudonym

Coronavirus disease 2019 = COVID-19

Coronavirus disease 2019 = CORDIS-19

Coronavirus disease 2019 = CVD

Coronavirus disease 2019 = CD-2019

Not that I'm against COVID-19 as a name, I just wonder how they picked it out of a list of equally arbitrary names





kleinbl00  ·  1733 days ago  ·  link  ·  

If I had to guess:

- CVD got nixed because it's three syllables that all sound stupidly similar; over any sort of deprecated audio communication pathway it would have ended up being "charlie victor delta" which would have had everyone calling it "Wuhan"

- CORVID got suggested (CORona VIrus Disease) until someone pointed out that it'd get called "crow flu" and someone else pointed out that half the world can't say the letter "r"

I'ma guess we're going with COVID "19" because if they could back out to call SARS COVID-02 and MERS COVID-12 and COVID-14 they would. In fact, I'll wager you'll start to see that. This is our third coronavirus outbreak in 20 years so it's likely that WHO thinks they oughtta do whatever they can to keep people from calling it "Wuhan."

By calling it COVID-19 there will be less freakout when we're dealing with COVID-26 (or whatever).

The virus is called "SARS-CoV-2".