Why not call it SARS-2?

SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are both corona viruses. When the SARS outbreak first happened in early 2000s, they called it SARS outbreak and called the virus SARS virus. Now, pretty much everyone (newspapers, articles, medical doctors on media etc.) calls SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. It makes sense to call it coronavirus but:

1.) Why did they not call it back in 2002-2003 coronovirus? It was SARS back then.
2.) If it was called SARS, why now change it to coronovirus?

My take on this is that they did not want to call it SARS-2 because the word SARS could create panic.

Has the C0V virus even been mapped yet?

Do you mean has the genome been sequenced? Yes.

I cannot speak for what “they” want so please take everything I say with a grain of salt.

They began studying the outbreak of a “novel” coronavirus and referred to it as such. It was quickly determined to be in the same species as SARS-CoV, therefore it’s SARS-CoV-2. Keep in mind that “SARS” is the disease name. Part of the claimed official rationale for naming the new variant COVID is that there was a wide variety of severity of symptoms and not everybody came down with acute respiratory distress.

  1. Because there are several types of coronaviruses. SARS has CoV attached to its name as well, although everyone just simply called it SARS.
  2. Before it got its official naming, the virus was referenced as “new coronavirus”. WHO didn’t want to refer it to with a “SARS” prefix to avoid confusion with the first SARS back in 2002-2003, and as you have already mentioned, to avoid causing panic.