Oh, so you cannot find my words defending a racist virus name.
No need to apologize.
Whatever you need to tell yourself.
There were a lot of words written here. Perhaps you were thinking of come other writer who defended a racist name for a virus. It would be very easy for you to get confused/
You’re rather glib about it, must say. You dismiss an increase in hate crimes as “anecdotal evidence”. You dismiss harm done because it’s not long lasting, in your humble opinion. Rather ugly.
Well, I suppose when you can show peer-reviewed research that does not depend on self-reported antidotes you might have something. I would be pleased to read it. Until then, you have a collection of stories told for whatever reason.
All of this is sad. Once, not too long ago, liberals were supporters of science. Now we seem to attack it.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Anecdotal. Sorry, I see my spelling got me! Nobody to blame but myself. Please forgive me. Thank you for pointing it out.
OK, so some person reports to some police department (some web site? some researcher?) that they were accosted by an idiot. Now how do we remove the cases that would have happened even if the traditional naming system had remained in place? How do we know that this incident or the other was caused by the old geographical naming system?
If we do not know, we are guessing. That is probably not ideal.
Excuse me, I am going to bed.
What the fuck are you talking about? Did you post this to the wrong thread?
In the event that it’s necessary for average folks to discuss and differentiate the variants, we’re going to need better names. Remembering a letter and a few numbers - which are effectively random to you - is not going to scale. People might remember one of them if it’s really important, but remembering and differentiating five of them? No chance. It’s not how people’s memory works.
Somewhere upthread, someone mentioned the example of flu variant naming. H1N1 is certainly in the common vernacular, and I bet a reasonable proportion of people would be able to tell you that the 1918 Spanish Flu was H1N1. I bet the number of people who could tell you the variant for any other flu epidemic is vanishingly low, myself included. But I can remember ‘Swine Flu’ in 2009.
And by the way, I assume your reference to the 40-year old SciFi franchise is to C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars. So that’s two characters. How would that have gone if everyone in the movies was named that way? And as one data point, as someone who has seen the movies but is not by any stretch a super-fan, I always get which is which mixed up. C3PO is the one who speaks English, right?
No. I posted this exactly where I wanted to. Thank you very much for asking…
In the UK, some people were keen to call it Chinese flu or Chinese covid in order to accuse the Cninese. However, they were not keen on the UK variant being called ‘UK’ or ‘Kent’.
But then they were very keen to blamme any immigrants arriving in Kent from Europe.
Tis all comes back to conspiracy theorists…
tend to blame a threat on “agents” they may already have reason to distrust. So they blame the Chinese (rather than natural mutations) but vcannot blame UK or Kent, so blame immigrants.
Also, people from the north of England blame the south (for being dirty). And people from the south blame the north, particularly areas of high ethnic population.
So,really, naming viruses ater places is just not helpful.
The Buruli ulcer, also known as the Barnsdale ulcer, was named the Barnsdale ulcer before it was realized that it was the same organism on the other side of the world. Calling it the Barnsdale ulcer helped identify the condition both for the purpose of research, and for diagnosis.
Calling COVID the ‘Wuhan disease’ was useful for the same reasons when it was the Wuhan disease, and became not particularly helpful when that ceased to be the case.