Local barber shop’s sign says “Wuhan Virus”

Here's a statement from WHO:

“In recent years, several new human infectious diseases have emerged. The use of names such as ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’ has had unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors,” says Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security, WHO. “This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected. We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods.”

WHO's best practices for naming diseases specifically suggest not naming things in a way that might have "unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people".

I'll c/p my other post on this, too.

Nature has a good op ed about this.

The "but Wuhan's just a place" argument is a smokescreen. The politicians who insist on calling COVID-19 the "Chinese Flu", "Wuhan Flu", or any variation thereof have been doing it explicitly to deflect attention away from their own mishandling of the pandemic response. Nobody is saying that the Chinese government hasn't been shady all the way through this crisis, but scapegoating the people of China and Wuhan is shitty.

Besides that, racists are running with it. Hate crimes against Asian Americans and Asians visiting the US (Chinese or otherwise) shot up significantly in March and April (this group have been tracking reported incidents: http://www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/). This is exactly what the folks who named the virus COVID-19 anticipated; they followed WHO guidelines against naming health issues after people/places because it they wanted to avoid stigmatizing any populations. Right now is not the time to play games with language.

/r/sandiego Thread Parent Link - i.imgur.com