# Regional Virus names bad. So what do we call the new variants?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regional-virus-names-bad-so-what-do-we-call-the-new-variants/931715>\
**Category:** The Quarantine Zone\
**Tags:** covid-quarantine\
**Created:** [January 28, 2021, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regional-virus-names-bad-so-what-do-we-call-the-new-variants/931715 "2021-01-28T20:27:38Z")\
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**Showing post:** 13

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**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\
**Post date:** [February 1, 2021, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regional-virus-names-bad-so-what-do-we-call-the-new-variants/931715/13 "2021-02-01T04:37:53Z")

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> [@Bonum\_Legatum](#):
>
> You may remember early reports of the “China Virus”, but the World Health Organization did not recognize that – the decision to refrain from geographic titles for viruses was made long before.
> 
> So what are the proper names for “the UK Variant” or the “South African Variant” that keep popping up in the news? Hopefully something that is concise.

No, I clearly recall that at the beginning, we called it “this coronavirus”, or “the novel coronavirus” or “the Wuhan Coronavirus”

Here’s a link to an old thread about it, when it first hit the new. The OP started, “so, how worried are you about this coronavirus”, and I’ve linked to a post that referenced the Johns Hopkins Wuhan Coronavirus Tracker.

> [@How concerned are you about this Coronavirus?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-concerned-are-you-about-this-coronavirus/847164/38):
>
> [Johns Hopkins Wuhan Coronavirus Tracker](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6) as of 1/29/20, 6,165 confirmed cases world wide 133 deaths 126 recoveries 95 cases outside China, in 19 countries 6,070 cases in China with a population of 1.3+ billion Not worried, but I’m watching it

Then it got an official name. The virus was named SARS-CoV-2 and the associated disease was named Covid-19, in accordance with current rules about how to name new human viruses.

[History of Name of Covid-19](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074995/#:~:text=The%20disease%20name%20was%20subsequently,on%20Taxonomy%20of%20Viruses.)

And only AFTER THAT, certain people who wanted to blame the virus on China started referring to it as the “China Virus”. No one ever called it that in good faith – that name was created and promulgated as a racist attack: originally an attempt to downplay the importance in the US, and then as an attempt to cast blame.

I’m not certain how long there have been guidelines discouraging naming diseases after regions. Certainly, people routinely violate them as it’s a handy way to refer to new diseases. And mostly it’s just descriptive. No one ever cast “Lyme Disease” as the fault of the town of Lyme.

As Stranger says, the formal names for those variants are not very user-friendly. That’s okay, we’ll have lots more variants soon enough, and no one but virologists will try to keep track of them. So they don’t really need good names.

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