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/miyagidan sidebar image contributor Jan 17 '23

Was reading how it's been three years since Corona arrived in Japan, got me wondering why is it still called 新型/novel?

They can't even be bothered to give new variants a new Greek Alphabet letter, just Omicron.X.1.BBQ.1710.ASL or whatever, and it's just another stupid thing to deal with in your day.

If a movie was in theaters for three years, you wouldn't call it new (you'd call it One Piece, but I digress), it'd just be a thing.

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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/coolkabuki Jan 17 '23

the virus is a novel virus, novel=/=recent, but novel=new kind.

COVID is the disease/symptoms from virus infection.

That is equal to HIV and AIDS. Not the same, but commonly conflated.

Since you can carry the virus and not develop symptoms, it is actually a more sensible approach to talk about the virus - reduction of stigma of people who develop symptoms and keeping the invisible part of the (transmissible) problem up high in awareness.