‘A bit chaotic.’ Christening of new coronavirus and its disease name create confusion
By Martin EnserinkFeb. 12, 2020 , 2:40 PM
“COVID-19. I’ll spell it: C-O-V-I-D hyphen one nine. COVID-19.”
That’s how Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO), introduced the agency’s official name for the new disease that’s paralyzing China and threatening the rest of the world. The christening yesterday, at one of WHO’s now daily outbreak press conferences in Geneva, ended 6 weeks of uncertainty about what the disease would be called—but it also created some new confusion.
COVID-19 is a name for the disease, not for the virus that causes it, which until now had a temporary moniker, 2019-nCoV, signifying it was a novel coronavirus that emerged last year. But the pathogen also got a new designation, which arrived before Tedros had even finished his press conference, by way of a preprint posted on bioRxiv by the body charged with classifying and naming viruses. The Coronavirus Study Group (CSG) of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, the paper noted, had decided to call the virus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2.
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