The signs I passed by on my way to work mostly said "because of COVID-19" and sometimes specifically "because of the COVID-19 pandemic"†, so that's good.
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>>I also think most people don't hear 1918 and think "ah, yes, Spanish influenza was going on back then".<<
I'm not even good at keeping track of timelines, and I totally hear 1918 and think "ah yes, the Spanish flu year" (sometimes "ah yes, the last year of World War I" happens to come first, but both are major associations and they both arrive in my consciousness pretty quickly). That could definitely just be a me thing, though.
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I've only seen one or two people calling it "Wuhan coronavirus", and I think they were people who got on the talking-about-it train back when it *was* primarily a Wuhan thing and just never changed their category tag. Randall Munroe seems to have been wrong about plain "coronavirus" sticking, though: IME people have been increasingly moving to calling it "COVID-19".
(I do think drawing a distinction between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 in non-technical speech is bullshit: if you really need to be clear for whatever reason that you're talking about the virus per se and not the disease, "the COVID-19 virus" is much more readily understandable than having a whole different word. You get to import the associations your audience has already formed with the term "COVID-19", rather than having to build new connections.)
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†Particularly useful since some plausible futures have *multiple* COVID-19 epidemics, and both the definite article and use of "pandemic" imply that this is the first one. Not to 100% confidence (especially since you can't be sure that a random small-business owner is using the word "pandemic" correctly††), but it helps.
††in related news, did you know that if you look up "pandemic" on Wiktionary you *literally* get a picture of COVID-19?
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2020-03-23 02:41 pm (UTC)---
>>I also think most people don't hear 1918 and think "ah, yes, Spanish influenza was going on back then".<<
I'm not even good at keeping track of timelines, and I totally hear 1918 and think "ah yes, the Spanish flu year" (sometimes "ah yes, the last year of World War I" happens to come first, but both are major associations and they both arrive in my consciousness pretty quickly). That could definitely just be a me thing, though.
---
I've only seen one or two people calling it "Wuhan coronavirus", and I think they were people who got on the talking-about-it train back when it *was* primarily a Wuhan thing and just never changed their category tag. Randall Munroe seems to have been wrong about plain "coronavirus" sticking, though: IME people have been increasingly moving to calling it "COVID-19".
(I do think drawing a distinction between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 in non-technical speech is bullshit: if you really need to be clear for whatever reason that you're talking about the virus per se and not the disease, "the COVID-19 virus" is much more readily understandable than having a whole different word. You get to import the associations your audience has already formed with the term "COVID-19", rather than having to build new connections.)
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†Particularly useful since some plausible futures have *multiple* COVID-19 epidemics, and both the definite article and use of "pandemic" imply that this is the first one. Not to 100% confidence (especially since you can't be sure that a random small-business owner is using the word "pandemic" correctly††), but it helps.
††in related news, did you know that if you look up "pandemic" on Wiktionary you *literally* get a picture of COVID-19?