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[Rolan7]

Sorry, it's important to the continuity of US government that it be called the English Virus now.

In positive good local news, my housemate is getting hazard pay-backdated through the pandemic! I didn't hear whether unions were involved, but apparently enough school custodians threatened to quit that money was found in the budget!  So that feels good, if belated.

[Starver]

It's just as likely the 'English Virus'[1] landed here from somewhere else, already lost in the rest of the mess, but only got sequenced here first because we like sequencing...



[1] Surely 'Britain Virus' would be better[2], to match the grammar of 'China Virus' rather than 'Chinese ...'. (And I never quite worked out if the ex-Pres called our guy 'Britain Trump' (which grates) or 'Briton Trump' (which grates less, but I think is beyond his vocab).

[2] I mean, technically 'England Virus', and often called named more specifically after Kent, over here, but I'm being magnanimous about it.

[LordBaal]

Without any kind of racial or negative indications, just facts and geographical pinpointment, Wuhan Influenza is not a bad name. Certainly better than "Chinese virus". Then you have Britain Strain and so on...

[martinuzz]

People are just oversensitive these days. The spanish flu has been called the spanish flu now for 102 years, and as far as I can tell there never has been anyone in Spain who took offense.

It's kinda hard to tread lightly when the ground is covered in eggshells

[LordBaal]

That is right. And it didn't even started on Spain.

[scriver]

I may be paranoid, but I think it's a Chinese influence thing. Back when we started called it the Wuhan virus the PC police went nuts about how we shouldn't call it that, but now that we have the British Virus and the South African Virus and the Brazilian Virus nobody gives a damn. But god forbid anything Chinese is even remotely negative.

I mean I was always in favour of the Corvid Flu but the difference in narrative is noticeable

[martinuzz]

Well, you can't really blame China for getting upset over it... They weren't upset about the name itself, they were upset that worldwide there were incidents of rightwing fucktards beating up people with Asian looks, blaming them for the virus.  But those would have probably done that just the same if it had been called 'random name generator result 3', because to them it just mattered that it originated from asianland

[Frumple]

I mean, it was largely popularized "china virus" by a virulent sinophobe actively engaged in waging a trade war against the country, at a point where there was already perfectly effective and pervasively used terms for it (covid or coronavirus). It was pretty explicitly a racist thing being pushed by racist people. Don't quite remember if the wuhan variation was the same but, y'know, probably.

[martinuzz]

In the first days of the outbreak, our media referred to it as 'the Wuhan virus, a corona type virus'. This was without any racist or xenophobe intention, it was just a matter of, well, that's how we name diseases. See: spanish flu

[ChairmanPoo]

People are just oversensitive these days. The spanish flu has been called the spanish flu now for 102 years, and as far as I can tell there never has been anyone in Spain who took offense.

Oh boy.... I´ve seldom seen it pop up *without* people getting angry.

[Starver]

Without any kind of racial or negative indications, just facts and geographical pinpointment, Wuhan Influenza is not a bad name. Certainly better than "Chinese virus". Then you have Britain Strain and so on...

British Strain, of the Chinese Virus. Or the Trumpian "Britain Strain of the China Virus". That's what I was getting at with most of the words I wrote.

Though we also don't have enough facts for geographic pinpointing, is how I started it.

There's doubt about Wuhan being the original epicentre, but once you get through the usual Chinese information-massaging you could see if precursor deathrates and general hospitalisations spiked elsewhere first. Even with the uptick in infectivities from the Kent-type, without going that extra mile to sample and fully analyse slightly historic samples from an almost worldwide subset of possibilities it's quite possible that the true source was somewhere else, perhaps a returning holidaymaker/bussinessperson who encountered it in a supposedly 'safe'/precautionary-enough foreign location, but we'll be hard-pressed to discover where. Call it a Kentish Virus if you wish (or a Virus Of Kent, depending on if it's from the east or west) but I'd guess it probably started elsewhere (and probably spread to everywhere else it has spread to by any number of non-Kent routings).

[LordBaal]

Spanish flu didn't started on Spain either. It's just naming convention I guess? Wuhan for better or worse was were all started, at least publicly and awareness was raised.

[Grim Portent]

Spanish Flu became the name for that particular pandemic because Spain at the time didn't have wartime censorship of their newspapers, unlike a lot of other European countries, which meant that the public perception was that Spain had tons more cases than anyone else when it was really just that everyone else wasn't talking about it openly.

It has/had different names, the Bolshevik Disease, the German Flu, the Brazilian Flu.

Apparently in Spain it used to be called Naples Soldier, after a musical number that was described as being as catchy as the flu.



I would not be surprised if the 1918 flu caused a rise in antisocial behaviour directed at Spanish expats and Spanish descended people in other countries hit by the pandemic, but there was already a war going on and all the cultural fallout from that, so people might have been too busy with other petty hatreds.

[Starver]

Personally, I think that the Spanish Fly or Spanish Flea are somewhat better than the Spanish Flu. The jury is out on cantharidin, though.

[scriver]

I mean, it was largely popularized "china virus" by a virulent sinophobe actively engaged in waging a trade war against the country, at a point where there was already perfectly effective and pervasively used terms for it (covid or coronavirus). It was pretty explicitly a racist thing being pushed by racist people. Don't quite remember if the wuhan variation was the same but, y'know, probably.

It was never called the "China virus". It was called the Wuhan virus. The USA is not the only place in the world, and Trump do not influence everything everywhere.

Well, you can't really blame China for getting upset over it... They weren't upset about the name itself, they were upset that worldwide there were incidents of rightwing fucktards beating up people with Asian looks, blaming them for the virus.  But those would have probably done that just the same if it had been called 'random name generator result 3', because to them it just mattered that it originated from asianland

I don't think China gives a fuck about those people. It's all a matter of perception to them. They lobbied to make the Wuhan virus taboo because god forbid something reflects badly on the most imperious country on earth, not because they care about people.

And that's why you don't anyone making a big deal out of the names of the three new strains being place names.