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Comment by allovernow | Hacker News Reader

The virus originated in Wuhan. This is no more inappropriate than calling the 1918 pandemic the "Spanish Flu". Ironically more so because the Spanish flu is thought to be a misnomer because Spain was simply the first place to report the flu in the news.

>deliberately implies a link to specific area and people, which is countereffective

No, what's counter-effective right now is social policing according to bleeding heart policies. Now is not the time to clutch at pearls and treat everyone "equally." Example: weeks ago Chinese Nationality and especially travel from Wuhan was a statistically strong prior for virus contact, and therefore the "xenophobic" travel bans were justified.

Sometimes natural disasters are politically incorrect. Your response must match else you risk putting other people at risk in the name of prudeness.

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> No, what's counter-effective right now is social policing according to bleeding heart policies. Now is not the time to clutch at pearls and treat everyone "equally."

Everybody knows that Wuhan is where it came from, and that it's been the hardest hit. My understanding is that what they're concerned about is long-lasting associations. 100 years later we're still calling the 1918 thing the "Spanish Flu"; I'd be willing to bet tourism to Spain dropped significantly in the decade that followed that epidemic.

Could you name the place where SARS originated? I can't; and even if I could it wouldn't be a strong correlation in my mind. That's what we want 10 years from now -- for people planning travel itineraries to associate Wuhan with a the actual city and surroundings, not with a disaster that happened a decade in the past.

This isn't "bleeding heart policies"; it's just simple Golden-rule consideration, based on a century of experience.

People are not going to forget this came from Wuhan whether you call it the Wuhan Flu or not.

I understand that the intentions are benevolent, but policing language does not change reality. No more than stigmatizing the word "retard" (originally a scientific term like moron, imbecile, idiot, and all the rest) will change people's responses to those with mental disabilities.

The downside to this kind of stigmatization is that people start to abuse it as soft cultural power, which breeds resentment and discord among the population. I'd be willing to guess it's literally one of the peculiar Western cultural features those "evil Russian hackers" (and other nation states) are targeting to wedge society apart.

> The downside to this kind of stigmatization is that people start to abuse it as soft cultural power

Humans have been enforcing social norms for at least as long as we have written history. And people have probably been abusing that habit for just as long.

Some social norms are good; others are bad. Some ways of enforcing social norms are polite, others are annoying, others (Twitter mobs) can be horrifying.

I would consider "Let's call this the coronavirus, or CORVID-19, out of consideration for Wuhan 10 years from now" as at least a reasonable one; and a polite request on Hackernews is hardly going to give you PTSD or ruin your life.

In other words: I understand where you're coming from, but "My right to call this the Wuhan virus" is a funny hill to choose to die on. :-)

>Let's call this the coronavirus

Because it's not "the coronavirus" any more than the Spanish Flu is "the flu". The Spanish Flu was one pandemic that happened with one strain of the flu; it's not the same flu that we get every year. Similarly, COVID-19 or whatever we end up calling it in the future is not "the coronavirus", because that term applies to MANY different viruses, including MERS and SARS.

>My right to call this the Wuhan virus" is a funny hill to choose to die on.

Please don't severely misrepresent the intentions and arguments of the other party.

Yes, exactly, it's no more inappropriate than calling it the spanish flu, which health authorities consider innapropriate. It didn't originate in Spain but a hundred years later we still link it with Spain. The whole point is that future pandemics should not be given names that are tied to a name or a person so that we can explicitly avoid another case like the Spanish flu where we name it after a place hundreds of years later. The better name for the Spanish flu is the 1918 flu pandemic.

>which health authorities consider innapropriate

This is politics, not medicine. The opinions of medical personnel are irrelevant. Moreover I'm not sure why you'd continue to trust these "official" medical sources when they've shown (CDC and WHO) to be incompetent and possibly corrupt.

>It didn't originate in Spain but a hundred years later we still link it with Spain

And it has no bearing on tourism to Spain or the treatment of Spanish people. So the policing is clearly unnecessary.

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