Coronavirus name change a bid to appease China concerns

The World Health Organisation director-general has announced a new name for the fast-spreading coronavirus.

World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Picture: AP

The World Health Organisation director-general has announced a new name for the fast-spreading coronavirus, as a senior WHO team visits Beijing on a crucial fact-finding mission.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a former health and foreign minister in the Ethiopian government, has gone to great effort to maintain a good relationship with China, as he oversees the global response to the virus — now officially named Covid-19 — which has killed more than 1100 people.

“Tedros is first and foremost an outstanding politician,” a source who has worked with the WHO director-general told The Australian.

There has been some criticism of the WHO leader’s repeated praise of China’s government, which followed weeks of cover-ups by officials in the virus epicentre of Wuhan.

Other public health officials say maintaining as good a relationship as possible with China is crucial to the global effort.

The WHO investigation team’s visit — which was delayed by two weeks for reasons the Chinese government has explained — is a crucial part of the UN health body’s efforts to deal with what it has labelled a “global emergency”. Discussions with senior Chinese government members, health officials and frontline medical staff should better inform the WHO’s understanding of the virus, so long as their hosts are transparent.

In 2003, a similar WHO investigation team was kept waiting in Beijing for more than two weeks before being allowed to meet local scientists and doctors to discuss the SARS virus. When the meetings did take place, they revealed their Chinese counterparts appeared to have little idea about the virus. “We left (those) meetings with the sense the Ministry of Health wasn’t really engaged with this as an issue,” said Keiji Fukuda, a member of the 2003 WHO team.

The current visit to investigate Covid-19 was agreed to after Mr Tedros met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in late January.

The announcement of the new name — a blend of “corona”, “virus”, “disease” and 2019 representing the year it emerged — will remove one topic from their agenda during the WHO team’s meetings.

China’s state-controlled media this week urged the WHO to give the virus a new name “as soon as possible to avoid further stigmatisation of Chinese people”.

In a story in the China Daily newspaper, a Beijing virologist was quoted as saying a new name was needed because people kept calling the disease “Wuhan coronavirus” or “Wuhan pneumonia”.

“These stigmatising names are becoming an excuse, and in some cases a political pretext, to justify mistreating the Chinese people and rallying anti-China supporters,” the doctor said.

Mr Tedros echoed the sentiment as he announced the new name in Geneva. “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,” he said.