Calling it the ‘South African variant’

[ControvertialYeti]

Am I being unreasonable in saying that this is just as derogatory as labelling the virus the ‘Wuhan virus’ when the pandemic started?

YABU - calling it the South African variant is completely different
YANBU - we probably shouldn’t be doing this as it’s as equally discriminatory as called COVID 19 the ‘China virus’ or ‘Wuhan Virus’

There’s a Uk variant too though... it’s just a way of distinguishing between them.

I know what you mean but they have also referred to the UK virus. When Trump kept saying the China virus it was obviously meant in a derogatory way to keep disparaging the country. ‘Logical’ people aren’t using the country of origin in a derogatory way from what I can see.

With new strains developing all the time I’m not sure how else they would easily distinguish between them?

And yes, the name Wuhan virus is correct. Believe it or not it is not the same variant that has been circulating around Europe from the beginning of last year.

Now if you want to pick a fight.... the Spanish Flu should be named the American Flu.

The Spanish Flu should be called the Kansas Flu if we want to properly drill down.

They more commonly refer to the UK virus as the Kent virus . I don’t understand why they don’t refer to the virus as the UK virus.
To me calling it the ‘Kent’ virus is a way to deflect attention away that the fact that the British government have been mostly incompetent . It is almost as though they have used migrants as the scapegoats for this new strain. When in doubt pin it on those migrants.
People were up in arms when Merkel talked about the ‘British Virus’ but are quite comfortable talking about the ‘South African’ and ‘Brazilian’ virus. The cognitive dissonance is astounding

Exactly. There shouldn’t have been an issue with calling it wuhan flu or the China virus.

The woke PC got their knickers in a twist when now we have the U.K. strain, SA strain, Spanish flu, West Nile Virus. Zika. Ebola all named after places.

World has gone mad.

Has Richard Littlejohn entered the chat?

I suppose it’s easier to say and remember. I live abroad and they often refer to the UK variant on the news.

Spanish flu - originated in USA. The Spanish press reported people were dying in mass numbers and it was enough for the anglosphere to identify the virus with Spain.

German measles - so named in English speaking countries after German doctors identified it as a virus. The rest of the world calls it rubella.

If you want to start being pedantic remember about glass roofs and hypocrisy.

Yeah fair points, and to be honest I completely agree and that’s what I was asking.
I don’t have a problem with calling it (insert country or place of origin) virus or variant but it seemed like at the time it all kicked off, there was a lot of stigma around labelling a place with a virus due to negative connotations.
I work with the public and was told we were specifically not to use Wuhan virus (which is what the bbc were using at the time)

But it sounds like most people here seems it would be ok to do that, as others viruses etc have been done so in the past.

It's to distinguish where the variants were discovered not necessarily where they originated (that is impossible to say). Not all countries have the ability to discover new variants. There could be about 4000 circulating.

There's the Kent strain- or the UK variant. It's to do with place of origin only. Although did stop getting called the Wuhan virus - allegedly because no one wanted to offend the Chinese.

@Lampzade

They more commonly refer to the UK virus as the Kent virus . I don’t understand why they don’t refer to the virus as the UK virus. To me calling it the ‘Kent’ virus is a way to deflect attention away that the fact that the British government have been mostly incompetent . It is almost as though they have used migrants as the scapegoats for this new strain. When in doubt pin it on those migrants. People were up in arms when Merkel talked about the ‘British Virus’ but are quite comfortable talking about the ‘South African’ and ‘Brazilian’ virus. The cognitive dissonance is astounding

They only call it the Kent variant in the UK, everywhere calls it the UK variant.

The variants all have official names but they boring mixes of letters and numbers so they are never going to use them in the news

Many diseases are named after the place wheee they originated. Zika and Ebola are named after the places where they were discovered. Along with West Nile virus and Middle East respiratory virus.

It was the CCP who didn’t want COVID-19 to be known as Wuhan virus. And for some reason the world obeyed.

Zika and Ebola aren't named after the places they originated. They are named after the places which had big outbreaks.

If we follow that logic then calling COVID the UK virus would be sensible given how bad we have had it. Or a dozen other places.

In any case, the fact that the ‘U.K.’ variant was first found in Kent quite likely means that it originated across the channel somewhere - ferries, channel tunnel, huge cross-channel traffic.
I gather that the U.K. does rather more genome testing than many other places, so it stands to reason that a variant would very likely be identified here first.

But viruses mutate all the time anyway, and I don’t think they’re too particular about where they do it.

No different to referring to the Brazilian and Kent /UK variants and a perfectly normal naming technique.

And it rolls off the tongue more readily than some of the other names in use

"for SARS-CoV-2. In its absence, various naming conventions are proliferating. For example, the team that identified one variant in South Africa named it 501Y.V2, after a substitution in the 501st amino acid site of the virus’s spike protein. By contrast, Public Health England is calling a variant identified late last year VOC 202012/01 — in which VOC stands for ‘variant of concern’, and the numbers include a reference to the month and year of discovery. Other groups are using the name B.1.1.7 for the same variant; this label comes from a classification system based on the evolutionary relationships of viruses"

WHO is however concerned about possible perjorative association with place naming. I think they were right in avoiding place name for the the whole new disease (so SARS-COV2 and covid19, not Wuhan/China) but I think that's nowhere near as important in the naming of multiple variants. Which need a unified system for scientific names (like the flu has) plus accepting that there is also a settled day-to-day name (like some major strains of flu - the ones that people talk about)