Corona Virus: Official Name

Environmental & Science Education

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Medicine

Edward Hessler

The Corona virus has an official name: COVID-19.

The World Health Organization (WHO) replaced its provisional designation, 2019-nCoV (indicating year, that it was new, and that it was a member of the corona family of viruses).  The new name is place and people-free, avoiding stigmatizing.

Whether it will stop online and media inventions, e.g.,. Wuhan virus or Wu Flu, etc., remains to be seen.

Andrew Joseph writes about the name change for STAT. 

In this Nature Video (3m 49s), reporter Heidi Ledford explains three key areas of research on COVID-19: epidemiology, virology, and biomedical science.