The Wuhan coro­n­avirus has an of­fi­cial name: COVID-19; Rev­o­lu­tion Med­i­cines up­sizes IPO terms

→ The dead­ly coro­n­avirus out­break — which has now killed at least 1,016 peo­ple as of Mon­day, a death toll that has sur­passed the SARS epi­dem­ic of 2002-3 — has an of­fi­cial name. The WHO on Tues­day chris­tened it “COVID-19.”

“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,” the WHO tweet­ed, quot­ing the agency’s di­rec­tor-gen­er­al Tedros Ad­hanom Ghe­breye­sus. “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.”

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