Covid-19: A failure of branding

[nopointinstaying]

So I might get pilloried for this, but why the hell did they call it Covid-19? People aren't scared of Covid-19, as it just sounds like some vague, abstract disease they won't contract.

Why didn't they give it a proper disease name? If the bubonic plague was going around everyone would automatically stay indoors until every last remnant vanished, but with Covid-19 meh whatevs.

They called it that because people were starting to call it things like "Wuhan disease" and "Chinese flu".

The WHO wanted to steer the name away from it being associated with China specifically because Chinese people all over the world were being accused of being disease carriers and facing horrible abuse in some cases.

So they went with novel coronavirus disease 2019, or CoViD19 for short.

'Coronavirus' is the name that's caught on, even though there are many Coronaviruses. CoVid19 doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way.

It's a bit like decimalisation in 1971- the intention was that we'd refer to decimal currency as 'new pence' but 'p' was what caught on with the public.

Same with swine flu. . That was H1N1 but everyone still called it swine flu.

Even BBC news call it Coronavirus. Covid-19 is a bit crap I agree. I'd have called it apokalypsis.

The official name of the virus is SARS-CoV-2. I think if they'd included SARS in the disease name somehow, people may have taken it more seriously from the get-go

Branding?

If the description of potential consequences isn’t enough to make people take it seriously, then those are dangerously stupid people in any circumstances.