I’m certain it’s because of the delerium from later stages of the disease, which causes the sufferer to experience being in another place and/or time during hallucinations.
Maybe in King’s mental backstory its building on from the benign Rock and Roll Fever, to the worse Boogie-woogie Flu, then to the engineered supervirus?
The truth seems to be less interesting than what I had imagined. I had assumed that since it was such an odd and irrelevant name, that it had come from people trying to pronounce an initialism as if it were an acronym, i.e. like there is the Southwest Florida Water Management District, or SWFWMD, that people call “Swiftmud”.
Something like Contagious Pulmonary Targeted Rhinovirus-like Pandemic.
Yeah, that’s correct - Larry is calling a hospital on the west coast and someone there does say that.
It’s been a while since I’ve read The Stand, but didn’t the virus essentially wipe out most of humanity in less than a month after it was released? It doesn’t seem like a lot of time for nickname to stick, but when everyone is dropping like flies I imagine we’d all be preoccupied with the virus.
It was released June 13, 1990 and by July 4 it had wiped out 99.4% of the world’s population.
My thought was that King, being a New Englander, was expressing a bit of disdain for the “trendiness above all” culture of California.
Another possible influence (which admittedly would contradict the ‘disdain for the West Coast’ theory) is William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist, in which the girl who becomes possessed calls the spirit inhabiting a Ouija board “Captain Howdy.” The movie, also written by Blatty, came out in 1973, and of course The Stand came out in 1978. The name could have stuck in King’s mind.