The new name for disease is COVID-19
World Health Organization says name met guidelines
It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But global health authorities want you start calling humanity’s latest deadly coronavirus COVID-19.
World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the new name this week, which he said met guidelines among WHO, the World Organisation for Animal Health and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
“We had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease,” the director general said. “Having a name matters to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing. It also gives us a standard format to use for any future coronavirus outbreaks.”
Will it catch on with the public, which already has become accustomed to referring to the disease as coronavirus, after the family of pathogens that causes it? Well, the broader name also describes viruses that cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome,
better known as SARS and MERS.
But COVID-19? Really? The logic behind COVID-19 is that it stands for COrona VIrus Disease and the year, 2019, it emerged.
“It’s a little clunky and not as evocative,” said Wendy E. Parmet, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Law. “But in some ways the purpose is to try not to be evocative and to give it the baggage and association of other diseases.”
Whatever happened to the colorful and descriptive terms of the past — plagues, poxes, scarlet and yellow fevers, sleeping sickness?
Parmet said often they predated the identification of the pathogen that causes them, emerging at a time when illnesses were associated with bad air or an imbalance of body fluids known as humors. Today, such colorful but imprecise terms might frustrate efforts to coordinate a global public health response.
“Historically, some of these terms have been used to cover a bunch of different things,” Parmet said. “The term ‘plague’ historically has been applied to many different diseases.”
Naming diseases after places or animals from which they might have originated is fraught for other reasons. It can cause economic harm to places or industries while fostering false assumptions about exposure risk.
“They’re trying to do them so as not to annoy any regional areas,” said Dr. Arnold S. Monto, professor of epidemiology and global public health at the University of Michigan. “It goes back to HIV, which emerged we think from Africa and was considered stigmatizing at that point. Africans didn’t like us saying it came from Africa.”
“It’s a little clunky and not as evocative. But in some ways the purpose is to try not to be evocative and to give it the baggage and association of other diseases.”
— Wendy E. Parmet, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Law
Regional disease names have continued — Zika, Ebola — but Monto said, “We’ve been getting more and more sensitive to that.”
Parmet noted that the 1918 global influenza epidemic often was referred to as Spanish flu, though it had nothing to do with the European country. But more importantly, associating diseases with regions can make local authorities reluctant to share information about emerging infectious diseases. There were concerns many were calling the coronavirus outbreak — oops, COVID-19 — Wuhan flu after the Chinese city where it first appeared.
“If a community or city worries if they’ll be tagged throughout history with the name of a disease, it increases their reluctance to coming forward and sharing with the world that there’s something going on here,” Parmet said.
Naming diseases after animals also is problematic — the term swine flu hurt the pork industry, and experts say it also can lead people to needlessly kill animals out of fear they will spread disease.
What about naming the diseases after people — like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease, named after the pathologists who first described them or famous figures who were afflicted by them? Hansen’s disease, after all, was considered an improvement over the better-known but deeply stigmatized term leprosy.
But experts say that identifying diseases with people carries other problems.
“I don’t think people want to be associated with infectious disease,” Parmet said. “And some of the people you name it after have got their own baggage, or there are disputes about who recognized it first.”
Naming diseases is actually harder than it might seem, Parmet said, noting that companies spend lots of money on experts and focus groups to name their products.
“It’s hard come up with something that doesn’t sound bureaucratic but is not offensive or misleading in another language,” Parmet said.
However, COVID is also the name of an electronics company, covid.com. The company didn’t answer requests for comment about COVID-19.
COVID-19, it should be noted, refers to the disease, not the pathogen.
The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which is responsible for developing the official classification of viruses, has tentatively proposed naming the 2019 novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 because of its close similarity to the germ that causes SARS.
WHO came up with its new naming protocols in 2015, citing concerns that “the use of names such as ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’ has had unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors.” Parmet said the benefits to public health and science of the new naming protocols outweigh their clunkiness.
“When we win in science, we lose in colorful prose,” Parmet said. “I think it’s a good bargain. COVID-19 might catch on, I suppose — no pun intended.”