trump calling the Coronavirus the “Chinese virus” is so fucking disgusting. if that doesn’t prove to you how alive and prevalent racism is today, I don’t know what will. (not that the people who need to understand the severity of it are capable of caring, otherwise they’d already admit that it still exists.) viruses do not have races!!!! why do you think everyone is capable of getting it!?
Zika virus. Ebola. Spanish flu. It’s not a new thing for viruses to be named after location or people. If you keep reaching that hard you’re going to strain something.
Calling it the “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu” is racist. It already has a name, so there is no point in attaching it to Chinese people. It’s ignorant and offensive stigma.
That would be like calling Ebola (which was named after a river, not an entire ethnicity) or Zika (which was named after a forest, also not an entire ethnicity) the “African virus.”
Why is this so complicated for you to understand? How are you not recognizing the difference?
(As a side note, the Spanish flu is called such because the pandemic received more press in Spain than anywhere else. Spain was one of the few major European countries to stay neutral during World War I, so they did not have wartime censors to suppress news about the flu to avoid affecting morale like the Allied and Central Powers did. The Spanish flu didn’t originate in Spain, they just brought the most attention to it. If that’s your argument, then maybe COVID-19 should be called the “American flu” since our media has blown it up so much more?)
It should also be noted that, ethically, you’re not supposed to name diseases after places! It’s genuinely not helpful. It’s more helpful to refer to diseases by their causes (like COVID-19, being a coronavirus infectious disease) or their symptoms (like scarlet fever, which has the primary symptoms of fever and body rash).
It’s not just COVID-19, either. There’s been a push to rename Lyme disease, which is named after the American town of Lyme, something like bullseye borreliosis (can’t recall the name off the top of my head). The bacteria is in the Borrelia family, and the bullseye rash is the signature symptom- much more helpful to someone who doesn’t know what’s going on!
