My wife is part of a Mom's group based in the bay area. One of the mom's in that group (who happens to be Taiwanese), wrote a post about how she was a victim of statements along the lines of
a) "It is funny you want to practice social distance when it is you folks who brought the virus here"
b) "How dare you show your face here during this time..."
And this was by the folks working at the checkout counter (with passive support from other shoppers there).
IMHO calling it Chinese / Wuhan virus opens the gate to these kind of hate crimes to become common place.
My wife, who is Asian, is terrified to go shopping.
My friend who is Asian (not Chinese) says she and her family are experiencing similar treatment. They get stared at harshly everywhere they go, which never happened before this crisis. They also don't want to go out anymore to get necessities because of this.
She should walk around with the video recorder on on her cell.
At least the Bay Area is pretty peaceful. It’s highly unlikely she’ll get physically assaulted.
Most famous diseases are names thus
* Spanish flu
* Ebola
Maybe there is a change in behavior with the name, but I suspect those people are taking advantage of the situation to express what they’ve always wanted to.
I understand "coronavirus" isn't specific, but why not just use that? Nobody this year will be confused what is being talked about. And if another coronavirus comes around, it will end up with a different commonly used name. Hearing "Chinese virus" the first time made me think first of a computer virus, then some brand new virus I wasn't aware of, and then finally realizing it was another term for the coronavirus.
> Nobody this year will be confused what is being talked about.
You'd be surprised. My relatives sent me a conspiracy theory video based on the fact that Lysol wipes manufactured in fall 2019 claim they kill "Coronavirus". So obviously the global conspiracy knew of the virus in advance!
Or, better yet, call it COVID-19. Slightly more specific than just coronavirus. Yes, COVID is the disease, not the organism, but for most common uses in everyday speech, that's probably ok.
I think 2019-nCoV is an older synonym, and now that the lineage has been established SARS-CoV-2 is preferred (and and -1 got added to the older one that used to just be SARS-CoV)
The WHO guideline has changed since 2015 (https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-d...) and all the virus discovered after has been named differently, I am not sure if anything was "manipulated" unless we think CCP knew this was going to happen 4 years earlier.
Most mainstream media were using "Wuhan Virus" or "Chinese Virus" before switching to "novel coronavirus" and finally the scientific name (after it was decided). The switch probably happened about the same time as Trump started referring to it on Twitter and in his speeches, as mainstream media tried to distance themselves from the President and use whatever name he was using as another way to criticize him. It's now become another full-blown front in the Culture War, with many SJWs attempting to even rename Spanish Flu on Wikipedia!
Seriously what the hell is this, can someone please explain? I don't understand why there is this smear campaign against the WHO in which people keep saying this. They do important shit, especially now, and it isn't their freaking job to point blame during an ongoing pandemic: it's their job to stop the problem from getting worse, and as far as I can tell they're doing a pretty good job. And, once it's over, maybe then we can all do the blame game if we need to figure out a root cause and stop it from happening again. Until then, it is completely counterproductive. (This is similar to how WHO doesn't try to extrapolate mortality rates until the dust settles: even if it is by some coincidence accurate, it doesn't tell us anything we need to know right now). This is a community full of software developers - a world where bugs get released into production on a regular basis. We should all understand _at least_ that.
Telling countries they shouldn't close their borders for fear of "creating stigma" is doing a pretty good job? The situation today is much worse than it could be because the WHO is more worried about doing politics than about health.
> Telling countries they shouldn't close their borders for fear of "creating stigma"
That's a huge misrepresentation of why WHO made those recommendations. The main point is that closing borders is ineffective and so you end up with only the negatives of doing that (and WHO stressed more the negatives around how it affects global supply chains and such for medical things).
'World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday that widespread travel bans and restrictions weren’t needed to stop the outbreak and could "have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit."' [1]
Of course now pretty much every country has closed their borders or at least severely restricted travel, and they did that because it works. But we have lost weeks without using a major tool to prevent virus spread, because of this virtue signalling that has cost lives.
> Every other virus that comes from a place gets named after it.
Every virus comes from a place, but many viruses are not named for a place even when the place of origin is known, and even the ones that have a place in the name are only rarely named “<place> virus” (e.g, “West Nile virus”), e.g., they are often named something Rose like “<place> <genus> (e.g., Zaire ebolavirus.) And even then, they are often referred to without the place name unless there is a specific need to differentiate within the genus (e.g., the virus with the species name Zaire ebolavirus is usually referred to simply as “Ebola”; it's not called “the Zaire virus”.)
SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, (both from China), and Hedgehog Coronavirus 1 (Europe) are all members of the betacoronavirus species with a particular identified geographic origin that don't have anything about geography in their name. And MERS-related coronavirus only has geography in it's name by way of the the name of the syndrome it was later identified as causing.
>Every other virus that comes from a place gets named after it.
This isn't true at all. No one is really worried about racism with regard to COVID-19, and instead, we're all very focused on health and safety. Injecting politics into this is distracting and unhelpful.
Very true. But wasn't it China who tried to blame the outbreak on "US soldiers" to protect the CCP? I think it's very justified for the US to counter that by clearly attaching the place of origin to the virus.
- The initial Chinese response was just to minimize, but then take the situation seriously when they realized the gravity of it.
- The "China virus" nomenclature is just a distraction, the intent is to make political enemies the focus in the US instead of focusing on the virus.
- The presumably CCP generated "US Soldier" claim has come later, and does not seem to be related to counter messaging the "China Virus language," except insofar as it might help continue to muddle US politics.
No, you're being paranoid. I don't know that it came straight from the CCP because I don't know much about the rumor. I never stated or even implied to that Trump started this rumor.
Maybe we shouldn't name diseases after places? It inherently associates the name of the place with the name of the disease - nobody would travel to Castle Anthrax. A geographically- and culturally-neutral name is the most appropriate.
Moreover, most diseases have symptomatic names (scarlet fever) or generic names (influenza). Keeping this in trend would be in line with the 2015 WHO recommendations.
Can we agree that it’s unlikely to have originated in Spain?
Would give us another reason not to name it for a place, as our knowledge might change after a name is established. At the end the names stays around for >100 years, although being wrong.
>In 1976, Ebola virus (EBOV) was first identified in Yambuku, 111 kilometers (69 mi) from the Ebola River, but Peter Piot decided to name it after the river so that the town would not be associated with the disease's stigma.
There is an irony in linking to that Wiki article that states that Ebola was not named after the town it was discovered for the exact reason some are saying COVID-19 shouldn't be named after Wuhan or China.
There's also irony in this conspiracy theory that China forced convention to change in order to make themselves look better... But the convention started changing mainly with the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_Nombre_orthohantavirus
Discovered in 1993 near the Canyon del Muerte on the Navajo Reservation, it was originally named the Muerto Canyon hantavirus, in keeping with the convention for naming new pathogens.[2] However, the Navajo Nation objected to the name in 1994.[3] It was also near the Four Corners point in the United States, so the virologists then tried naming it the "Four Corners virus". The name was changed after local residents raised objections.[4] In frustration, the virologists changed it to Sin Nombre, meaning "without a name" in Spanish.
And the result of that was immense discrimination against, and fear of, the people from that region. Similar to many people now blaming anyone they perceive to be Chinese.
Literally everything counts as censorship nowadays, huh? This isn't hiding the origin or making it privileged information. This is to help curb irrational fears against a certain area. What's funny is that this change in naming convention started within the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_Nombre_orthohantavirus
Discovered in 1993 near the Canyon del Muerte on the Navajo Reservation, it was originally named the Muerto Canyon hantavirus, in keeping with the convention for naming new pathogens.[2] However, the Navajo Nation objected to the name in 1994.[3] It was also near the Four Corners point in the United States, so the virologists then tried naming it the "Four Corners virus". The name was changed after local residents raised objections.[4] In frustration, the virologists changed it to Sin Nombre, meaning "without a name" in Spanish.
The point is that information is deliberately abstracted behind an additional layer for the sake of making it more difficult for the average person to obtain, and the ultimate intent behind that added friction.
You aren't responding to my question regarding intent at all.
>This is to help curb irrational fears against a certain area.
...by adding an extra degree of separation between the name and knowledge of the origin. Right? Do you disagree?
Censor and censorship bring with them different connotations, connotations that you purposely want to include; do you agree on that?
It's not adding a degree of separation between name and knowledge, no. It's removing unnecessary and also potentially-damaging information from the name of a pathogen. Why are you not advocating for a name like SARS-CoV-2, which contains more information and is more accurate?
>It's not adding a degree of separation between name and knowledge, no. It's removing unnecessary and also potentially-damaging information from the name of a pathogen
How is this not just adding a degree of separation between the name and knowledge of the "unnecessary and also potentially-damaging" information?
That's...exactly what it is. You have to perform one more step to reach the information. It's not "removed" because you can still access it. That's what an additional degree of separation means.
>Why are you not advocating for a name like SARS-CoV-2, which contains more information and is more accurate?
I don't care about the name at all, and you are making huge assumptions here. I would even argue that having SARS in the name is problematic due to its prior association with a specific region in the general public's mind. I'm surprised you didn't consider that before me.
It's adding a degree of separation in the same way that saying water instead of dihydrogen monoxide adds a degree of separation between the name and knowledge of chemistry.
So you're saying that information is being removed but SARS has connotations with a specific region in the general public's name? Ok.
>It's adding a degree of separation in the same way that saying water instead of dihydrogen monoxide adds a degree of separation between the name and knowledge of chemistry.
The degree of separation in our discussion has to do with adding an additional step to knowing the origin of a virus. What would the intent behind your example be?
You're the only one saying "removed" here. Removal and abstraction/adding an extra degree of separation are not the same thing. Removal means you can't access the information at all, no matter how many additional steps you take. If removal is what you have had in mind all along, that goes back to where I was going with my original question, and your response here provides me with a definite answer. Thank you :)
Do viruses that were first discovered in India have meaningful differences from viruses first discovered in Portugal? Is this actually under debate? The point is to avoid undue harm from an arbitrary, random event from actual people.
No Spanish flu was first reported on a military base in the USA. But we call it the Spanish flu even if we don’t know it’s original origin. Stigmatizing areas is stupid. China earned it but we are better than that.
No, Trump only started using China Virus after China started their propaganda campaign saying that it actually started in the US, and the US spread it to China on purpose. Their propaganda campaign is pretty widespread in China and some of my friend's grandparents actually believe it.
these viewpoints are just so incredibly callous. This naming convention is contributing to real persecution against real people. That's all the justification anyone needs to change. Who cares what the convention used to be?
What persecution?
Do you personally know anybody who is going to attack a Chinese person, or person of Chinese descent, for the origin of the virus? Do you know a single person who would do this?
I think that in an effort to guard against the absolute lowest common denominator of human behavior, a lot of people's paternalistic tendencies come out. Treating people like children to keep everyone safe. It's the justification for censorship used by every authoritarian regime. Ironically, the attitude of shaping the publicity of knowledge to shape human behavior is exactly what caused the police to detain this hero for having the audacity to talk to his colleagues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
Attempts to incite xenophobia and construct a foreign "other" for use during the 2 minute hate aside, the people of Winnipeg have suffered enough by living in Winnipeg.
It's going to end up as both, because in public speaking, we don't control our meaning -- the people do. The branding power of the "Chinese Virus" is going to reach Asians across America.
Then how should higher-level geopolitics and popular sentiment modification be carried out better? China is undoubtedly leveraging every bit of power they have to sow popular opinion against the US. How can the US counter that without bringing claims of racism?
And this was by the folks working at the checkout counter (with passive support from other shoppers there). IMHO calling it Chinese / Wuhan virus opens the gate to these kind of hate crimes to become common place.
My wife, who is Asian, is terrified to go shopping.