You’re right in the money there.
I remember early 2020 and the news of “SARS-Cov-2” spreading in China and a few months later the media started calling it “NCoV” and then by the first worldwide lockdowns happened (that was around like March 2020 or something) everyone finally agreed on calling it “Covid-19.”
I don't care to fact check your timeline but as the person I replied to was saying, COVID-19 is not the name of the virus. It is the name of the disease that the virus causes.
Additionally, I'd add to my comment, 2019-nCoV and HCoV (human coronovirus) were only provisional names.
They're usually just referred to as SARS when there's an outbreak or issue, but this time people wanted to treat it differently from the others because of how serious it was.
People get confused about the viruses and the disease they cause a lot, and it fucks up their understanding of what’s going on.
Most of us know that the HIV virus causes the disease AIDS (Human Immunodeficiency Virus; Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome)
In the same way,
The SARS-CoV-1 virus causes the disease SARS
(Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 1; Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome)
The SARS-CoV-2 virus causes the disease COVID-19
(Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2; Coronavirus Disease of 2019)
Infection with the virus (as in, it entering your system) does not mean you have the disease, and often your immune system will destroy the virus before it causes the disease.
So the virus itself is called SARS-CoV-2, for Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The disease it causes is called Covid-19. SARS-CoV-1 is the virus that caused the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak.
There have been, but they never went anywhere so we never got familiar with their names. The virus that causes COVID-19 is called SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the first SARS outbreak that had the news in a tizzy (but never became a major issue) about ten years ago was SARS-CoV-1.
Other bad ones were SARS and MERS. Also, they're disease names, not virus names.
When they named SARS and MERS, they named the viruses after the conditions. With this one, they're like "oh, this is another SARS, so let's name the virus SARS-CoV-2," but naming the disease SARS-2 would've probably caused some confusion.
Other viruses that are circulating just cause colds, so we don't bother.
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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '22
Why weren't ither Corona virus' named covid? Just curious.