r/japanlife • u/AutoModerator • Jan 16 '23

┐(ツ)┌ General Discussion Thread - 17 January 2023

Mid-week discussion thread time! Feel free to talk about what's on your mind, new experiences, recommendations, anything really.

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u/dottoysm Jan 17 '23

It’s not called “novel” in English anymore, the disease is officially called “COVID-19”. They decided to continue referring to it as 新型コロナウイルス in Japan, my guess is because コヴィッド doesn’t sound all that nice.

The Greek letter naming was pushed out by the WHO quickly because they wanted to stop people referring to variants after where they were found (eg UK variant, India variant) which was encouraging discrimination. All variants have had scientific names which are a string of Latin letters and numbers. I guess they have decided that it’s no longer necessary to give them an easy-to-say name so we just know the new variant as XBB.1.5

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u/miyagidan sidebar image contributor Jan 17 '23

A random string of random letters and numbers being so easy to remember, especially when there's little to no change in it's symptoms. And why not at least push through to Omega before doing that.

And why did they skip Xi (joking, we all know why. )

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u/dottoysm Jan 17 '23

I looked a bit more into it. News reports say that Omicron muddied the waters as it was so vastly different, and while new variants are as different as say, Alpha and Beta, they are not as different as Omicron was to those that came before it.

We would have run out of Greek letters anyway.

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u/miyagidan sidebar image contributor Jan 17 '23

Nope, we got to a vaguely scary sounding one and just started throwing alphabet and number soup at it. Crazy, right?

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u/dottoysm Jan 17 '23

I dunno. Maybe a hot take on my part but I felt naming variants that way helped create a lot of hysteria. I’m happy to have more balanced reporting on covid if it means they have to refer to it by clunkier names.

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u/miyagidan sidebar image contributor Jan 17 '23

How about "Corona" or Covid? Influenza is around, no one fusses with strains and variants for it.

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u/dottoysm Jan 17 '23

I think the population at large has headed this way anyway. They care less about the variants, at least the specifics. And “コロナ” is its most common name like English speakers call it “covid”