Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization announced on February 11th 2020:
First of all, we now have a name for the disease:
COVID-19. I’ll spell it: C-O-V-I-D hyphen one nine – COVID-19.
Under agreed guidelines between WHO, the World Organisation for Animal Health and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, we had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease.
Having a name matters to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing. It also gives us a standard format to use for any future coronavirus outbreaks.
Catchy, or what? I guess “Kung flu” didn’t meet those criteria. But is CoVID-19 so named for fear of offending the woke? A few triggered rants on the periphery of the internet won’t help matters, but in the face of a pandemic threatening to kill millions, the naming might seem a little trivial. Evidently not so.
Big pharma spends big money on branding their warez and protecting them against copywrite infringement, and for obvious economic reasons – they deliberate upon an image to increase their market share. A well “branded” virus is hardly meant to spread the bug, quite the opposite, but it does illustrate that communication is not just about biological infection. We are looking at the communication of memes and moreover, the harm reduction considerations of how those memes might be expressed as population-level behaviour. Accurate diagnosis does help with medical intervention and containment, but there are non-biological implications that spin-off from an outbreak and may indeed be more damaging than the pathogen itself. These are the maladaptations that manifest in a cascade of social, cultural, economic and other knock-on problems of dysbiotic memes.
To give a thought experiment employing deliberately repugnant hyperbole: suppose a virus got called “dirty bat eater virus”, or “Chinese zombie apocalypse virus”, or “civilisation is going to collapse and we’re all going to die virus” – of course, these are way-way over the top. Even reigning it back in a little, it is all too easy to make inferences, and press sensationalism relishes the fear it spreads in the guise of “public interest” – they tarnished one poor victim with the term “super-spreader”. Seemingly small allusions can make us jump to conclusions when in a state of stress and uncertainty. But like a phobia, as an irrational fear, when self-preservation makes system one instinctive thinking kick-in, then reason and perspective fly out of the window. Socially, this can be a self-fulfilling prophesy, and act as a butterfly effect – a nervous twitch can rapidly become a stampede. Watslawick noted this about panic buying during a fuel crisis. If hysteria spread about the possibility of food shortages caused by an outbreak, then the ensuing panic buying would soon empty the shelves even if there was no actual interruption in the supply chain. Among the complexity of interlocking systems, there would be the risk of catastrophy, and this certainly would not help with dealing with a pandemic.
Calling the current outbreak “Kung-flu” may seem tame compared to the suppositions above, some may consider it offensive and racist, but the real hazard is that the term itself has all the hallmarks of being a highly contagious meme, and one that carries certain intonations that could have maladaptive social expressions. CoVID, on the other hand, doesn’t seem quite as alarming.
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