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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

The canary I'm watching is the whole "Chinese" or "Wuhan" vs. "COVID" virus naming issue.

I think it is very clearly not the right time to point fingers. But when this is all past us, a post-mortem and finger pointing is probably warranted. I don't think we need to resort to name calling, but I'm curious to see how much people bend over backwards to absolve China of responsibility.

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I think the most evenhanded answer would be to use the correct names (SARS-CoV-2 for the virus, Sars 2 for short, COVID-19 for the disease, Covid for short) while freely reminding people that China's initial cover-up was a necessary condition for the present global crisis.

While these are all correct and proper, everyone I know is on first terms with it and so we all call the virus and the disease Corona.

While I think that's a valid point to make. My perspective on that is that, given contradicting reports and initial confusion, you can't fault any organization or person not picking out the correct response in the total state space. Hindsight and all that.

I think a much more powerful complaint is pointing out that, despite numerous warnings, studies, SARS, and having successfully isolated the root cause of the SARS outbreak (Civets). Only four months later these animals were back on the menu. The government made a rational choice to allow the conditions for the current situation to exist. The whole world is paying the price for this rational, prolonged and often pointed out mistake. That, I think, is a complaint we can lay wholly on the government.

>My perspective on that is that, given contradicting reports and initial confusion, you can't fault any organization or person not picking out the correct response

You can fault an authoritarian, oppressive regime for covering up the virus and suppressing whistleblowers. Now the world is paying for the CCP's SOP.

As an American, I was really disappointed in the CDC response. Even in the initial confusion, it's their fundamental job to prepare for and monitor these crises. Despite SARS and MURS, they still weren't prepared on a basic level to confront a respiratory disease (no meaningful stockpile of N95 masks or ventilators nor plans for ramping up production of the same) and then the whole debacle with the CDC vs WHO tests. The experts seem to be saying that tests are the most important aspect of the response and we botched that royally; only recently has our testing capacity begun to trend toward adequate (failing to address this sooner means the loss of life is exponentially greater). Note that these failures are independent of whatever initial confusion there may have been about this particular disease.

And I don't think this is a simple case of hindsight: we've had several respiratory epidemics in the last couple of decades and we were still caught unprepared.

I'm no expert and perhaps there is a reasonable explanation for all of this, but I suspect it was really negligence to the tune of thousands of American lives and who knows how much economic damage.

The maddening part is that we had the capability to deal with this and the systematically destroyed it.

There was a stockpile, but it was allowed to be depleted. There was a pandemic response team, but they got laid off. Hell, the Obama-Trump transition teams even wargamed this exact scenario but it wasn't taken seriously.

Amusingly, if you look at the talk section [1] of the Wikipedia article on the Spanish flu, some folks really (suddenly, recently, completely by coincidence) want to call it the 1918 flu.

There's no con job like a retcon job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spanish_flu

Seems fair enough:

> To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the pandemic's nickname, "Spanish flu". Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify with certainty the pandemic's geographic origin, with varying views as to the origin.

It's not like we call syphilis "French pox" any more.

Lyme disease, Ebola, et al would like to have a word.

Ebola is actually named that to avoid naming it after a specific village, to reduce the stigma. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704633

Lyme disease was around in humans long before its identification in Old Lyme, CT, so it too is an inaccurate name.

(We've also learned a few things since the 1970s, let alone 1918. Now, we have a standard: https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-has-a-name-the-deadl...)

Marburg.

"Marburg virus was first described in 1967."

And shall we rename it?

Marburg's name is at least accurate.

There are two separate issues here: Place-based names cause a stigma (an issue for new diseases, less so for historical ones) and that "Spanish flu" is actually completely wrong on the origins of that specific disease.

So why the timing to rename it? Why now?

I am asking that because you did not address it in my original comment, so I am going to harp on it again. Why now?

Why not?

It was a global pandemic that didn't even start in Spain. We happen to be paying a lot of attention to it because it's the last really global pandemic of similar severity/spread to the COVID-19 outbreak. The increased attention to this little bit of history has us asking whether we should correct the inaccuracy in its name.

Even the CDC calls it the "1918 flu pandemic". https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoratio...

Not as a reaction to COVID-19, either: "Page last reviewed: March 21, 2018"

That isn't what I was asking. I asked, why now. What about this instance in time has prompted this? Also, I was talking about Wikipedia. Please do not move the goalposts on me.

I guess the Socratic method isn't going to work here.

Bluntly put, some folks are full Ministry-of-Truthing away at Wikipedia to help justify their attempts at erasure of the "Wuhan flu," China connection. That's why it is happening now. "See, we don't call it the 'Spanish flu,' so why should we call it ..."

It's terribly skeezy.

You’re reading a lot of malice into “let’s call it what the CDC called it two years before all this”.

The timeline doesn’t work.

I demand we stop naming hurricanes after people. I don't know how to handle a reality where my first name is associated with a bad thing.

We actually do exactly that: we retire hurricane names for being associated with a bad one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_retired_Atlantic_hurri...

Not what the poster asked for. We actually don't do that.

"Spanish" Flu is not derogatory when used in the context of explaining the Spanish press were progressive and free to report on their surroundings without gov oppression.

Unlike the rest of world, who were covering up their military losses due to illness.

Yeah. The only illness called by a place where it didn't start or was discovered. Totally fair.

I don't know, now seems like a great time to point fingers at the small percentage of the Chinese population that is obsessed with eating weird shit like pangolin(probably the same people who are driving certain African wildlife extinct as well). Or that the authoritarian government cover up of the virus helped take it from a local emergency to a global pandemic.

No one has any issues saying that the US bungled the early stages of response for coronavirus.

On our priority list, containing the virus is way higher than making sure China takes responsibility (how is this even a debate?), but the US Executive branch leader (and everyone who follows that lead) has a major priority inversion.

The virus will be contained at some point, and then we can talk about responsibility. If China's policy on wildlife led to this pandemic, then they absolutely deserve to be shamed into changing their policies (permanently this time). They knew better.

Sure, but that shouldn't be used to dodge responsibility in other areas, like the abysmally slow response in many countries including the USA.

Let's not give racists any opportunities here. Calling it China virus or similar does exactly that, while confusing people with yet another name for this virus.

The Chinese government needs to be called out, but specifically and unambiguously the government.

The government can only do so much to change culture, though, right?

It needs to be made unambiguously clear that you do not eat or recreationally touch bat or pangolin. Government needs to outlaw it yes, and culture also need to shun it.

As another example the Chinese slaughter of endangered species and sharks is a failure of both government and culture. I'm not sure there is a totally PC way to express that.

All of this is done by a small percent of people but they need to be educated or shamed into compliance. We don't have to allow bad behavior because it could be un-PC to call it out.

Yes, that's true. There is a cultural element that is to blame as well. My point is that the term "China virus" is not the right way to place blame where blame is due. There will be a lot of collateral damage if it becomes popular.

The government can only do so much to change culture, though, right?

The Chinese government is famous for having done it.

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