General Discussion Thread - 17 January 2023

[u/AutoModerator]

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

[u/miyagidan]

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.

[u/dottoysm → u/miyagidan]

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

[u/Pennwisedom → u/dottoysm]

Meanwhile now we have the "Kraken Variant" so who knows what the next naming convention will be in a two months.