India tells social media firms to remove 'India variant' from Covid content | Hacker News Reader

India tells social media firms to remove 'India variant' from Covid content

bbc.com

34 pointsPick-A-Hill201920 comments

We had zero qualms about refering to UK variant and South Africa variant.

This is just the Indian government focussing on image management instead of actually doing something useful.

Remember kids, each time you call it India variant, Modiji cries.

I think a sane way of seeing it is that the variant was "first discovered in".

So even though this variant was discovered in India, it has now caused Germany to quarantine travellers from the UK over the Covid Indian variant.

https://www.thelocal.de/20210521/germany-bans-travel-from-uk...

An issue might be if e.g. another more serious variant is discovered in say UK. How should that be reported to the public, the second UK variant maybe ?

Otherwise i totally agree, India should be focussing on dealing with the crisis.

This is something I've personally done. I call it B1617 because I thought it was bad taste when the last president called it the [country] virus, or the [city] flu, and I feel Indians deserve the same respect.

So is it okay to say B1617 from India or believed to have come from India?

There are no hard rules to this. I just default to offering Indians the same respect that I give to other countries with more leverage to kick reporters out or take punitive action against western media bigotry. If you feel that this is a burden, then it's all the more reason you should defend Indians' dignity because to do so is to force your ideological rivals to live to up to their own standards.

The political stuff aside, please don't call it "B1617", because the name in that nomenclature is properly "B.1.617". The dots do have meaning and tell the history of the strain.

Still okay in casual conversation (vs. scientific discourse).

No, it's really not. Getting names right is important. Failing to do so offends people (when it's a person's name) and confuses everyone (always). When you make an unforced error like this, you confuse everyone who knows what they're talking about, because they can't understand you easily.

So don't make unforced errors. Get names right. You wouldn't trust a compiler that silently patched up incorrect variable names, would you? So why do that to people?

And it's really B.1.617.2 to distinguish it from the variant of concern first seen in South Africa, B.1.617.1

B.1.617.1 and B.1.617.2 are closely related (along with B.1.617.3) and all might be called the "Indian Variant" in popular usage.

The "South African Variant" is B.1.351.

That's a great point I hadn't really thought about. There's not much of a difference between this and calling Covid-19 the "China Virus", besides the intent of the speaker.

.. in Bedford due to Indian variant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27250045 .. (waves?)

On linked picture super-precise _descriptions_ by BBC:

  UK "Kent" variant B.1.1.7
  UK "India" variant B.1.617.2
  Brazil variant P.1
  South Africa variant B.1.351

Edit:

  UK, same as in India, variant B.1.617.2

- would it be fine ? (but longer) - if Indian may be misleading regarding Jack000 comment.

If recombination happen (variant with B.1.1.7 and B.1.617.2 mutations) it may be called here UK "Bedford (& Glasgow?)" variant without "India" in the description.

& Bolton - except this one, Indian population of England and Wales http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/born_abroad/coun...

doesn't match https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map ,

but: In Bolton, the areas with the highest infections over the last week map very closely to areas with the lowest vaccination rates ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57094274 ) and this variant evolved without much of the vaccine pressure (Kent variant evolved with not a risk for children and there may be some antibodies).

.. and not how the virus is called is the real problem.

It's a variant, it was first detected in India, let's just be adults and call it the India variant.

By that logic, curious where did COVID-19 originate and what do we call it?

As they should, look at the trouble caused by calling COVID-19 the `China virus` or `Wuhan Flu`.

I suspect, but cannot prove it is attributable to /some/ of the anti asian sentiment we've seen of late.

No, racism is attributed to racists.

"Indian variant" is descriptive of where the variant came from, nothing more.

Killing the integrity of language as a way to counter racism is non-sense, much in line with the neoliberal wokeism allowing it to be acceptable to not differentiate the use of master when in computer terms in master-slave or blacklist/whitelist simply because a lack of critical thinking and perhaps anger interrupting or disrupting that differentiation ability; we must hold the line for the integrity of language.

> "Indian variant" is descriptive of where the variant came from, nothing more.

There are two possible interpretations of a phrase like "Indian virus" 1. a virus that originates from India (the country) 2. a virus carried by Indians (persons)

Ultimately it doesn't matter much which meaning you attach to it, either one can be racist if you use it as a political slogan. It's mostly the context that matters in this case imo

This is the Indian variant of stupidity.

The government has no authority to polish its public image and it could just issue a clarification I needed. But simply asking companies to recall the harmless pair of words is hopeless & demonstrates lack of understanding of civil liberties by current politicians.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com