What could the WHO rename this virus/illness to help reassure people like they did with SARS-CoV2 and COVID-19?

E4 Reddit (hantavirus search) · 2026-05-13 · Italy · ANDV

In early February 2020 there was no global COVID pandemic, only an outbreak localized to Wuhan. The WHO didn’t want people to panic or stop working/shopping/traveling so they named the illness “COVID-19” even though the virus was named “SARS-CoV2” in order to distance it from SARS and avoid panic. This was admitted around February 13, 2020 by a WHO spokesperson in a statement to the journal Science, source link and excerpt included below. At that point there were isolated cases else where but the only known sustained outbreak was in Wuhan and it would be a couple weeks until it became a big issue in Italy causing mass death, and a month before NYC locked down and the refrigerated corpse trucks came out as 20,000 people died in the city over the course of about 45 days from SARS-CoV2 or COVID-19. With this in mind, what do you think the WHO could rename this virus/illness to make it sound more safe and warm and cuddly and make extra sure nobody stops working/shopping/traveling for at least a couple of months until the World Cup is over in late July? Maybe “Andy’s Virus”? Or “Holiday Fever”? A lot of the rodents that spread it are pretty cute and fairly obscure, maybe “pygmy rice rat fever”? Or just referring to it as ANDV the actual virus acronym would help downplay any thoughts of hantaviruses or acute respiratory distress. Other ideas? Sources on the SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 naming thing: https://www.science.org/content/article/bit-chaotic-christening-new-coronavirus-and-its-disease-name-create-confusion "The Coronavirus Study Group (CSG) of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, the paper noted, had decided that the virus is a variant of the coronavirus that caused an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002–03. So, it named the new pathogen severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2. But that's not a name WHO is happy with, and the agency isn't planning on adopting it. "From a risk communications perspective, using the name SARS can have unintended consequences in terms of creating unnecessary fear for some populations, especially in Asia which was worst affected by the SARS outbreak in 2003," a WHO spokesperson wrote in an email to Science . "For that reason and others, in public communications WHO will refer to 'the virus responsible for COVID-19' or 'the COVID-19 virus,’…" submitted by /u/Dismal_Chemistry_434 to r/hantavirusoutbreak [link] [comments]

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