I was recently in France and was told by a local this was actually an issue with the covid outbreak. There is a department that decides on the gender of new words and they determined covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.
Every couple of years they release a statement that causes a flurry of changes in the documentation of a few projects I've worked on. Always in really curious ways too, exchanging words that are common to French people in our industry with words uncommon to everyone.
I kind of appreciate the quirkiness of the whole thing.
TIL. Fascinating.
> covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.
And here I was hoping that I was being too pessamistic.
It's mostly due to the pronunciation and spelling of the word ending. Although in this case, the Académie Française decided feminine because COVID is an acronym, and the last word of that acronym is disease, and disease is a feminine word (la Maladie) because of how it is spelled.