The basic point in this post - for now - is that the ICTV did not "announce" a name of the virus on Feb 11, 2020, as has been and is currently claimed by the WHO.
--There's no documentation showing they did so
--The ICTV data secretary said the organization didn't make such an announcement and (correctly) points out that the organization doesn't make decisions about virus names.
There is conflicting information about the upload dates of the pre-print, but even if the date was Feb 11, 2020, the CSG uploading a pre-print doesn't constitute an ICTV announcement. Given that the group (comprised of academics) had submitted the paper to Nature on Feb 5th, and the paper had not been accepted by Feb 11, 2020, it's highly unlikely that the group would have seen its preprint as a "final" choice on its part, let alone an announcement.
WHO recommended 2019-nCoV as the interim virus name on Jan 30, 2020. Even without the emails (which I'll share soon), we can infer from several public sources that WHO was averse to what the CSG was recommending published in the Nature paper: 1) the differences between the pre-print and final versions of the Nature paper, and 2) the language in the WHO communications in Feb 2020, 3) the current WHO page on the virus & disease names (linked in post above).
Why did WHO seem to want a far more generic name -- one that didn't place it in an existing "species"? Why did they use the language "the virus that causes COVID-19"? It's all very bizarre, especially when you consider this virus wasn't doing a darn thing in any data point of any kind until respective governing officials in various countries enacted plans and launched mass testing.
EDIT: WHO had started using 2019-nCoV around January 10, 2020. As far as I can tell, January 30, 2020 was their first more "formal" recommendation for an interim virus name. But, based on information in the CSG emails, we can see the recommendation for an interim name came AFTER the CSG had reached consensus about a name (i.e., SARS-CoV-2).
Interesting dig into the genesis of the "virus" name. What significance does this have - who named the virus, and when? Thanks.
The basic point in this post - for now - is that the ICTV did not "announce" a name of the virus on Feb 11, 2020, as has been and is currently claimed by the WHO.
--There's no documentation showing they did so
--The ICTV data secretary said the organization didn't make such an announcement and (correctly) points out that the organization doesn't make decisions about virus names.
There is conflicting information about the upload dates of the pre-print, but even if the date was Feb 11, 2020, the CSG uploading a pre-print doesn't constitute an ICTV announcement. Given that the group (comprised of academics) had submitted the paper to Nature on Feb 5th, and the paper had not been accepted by Feb 11, 2020, it's highly unlikely that the group would have seen its preprint as a "final" choice on its part, let alone an announcement.
WHO recommended 2019-nCoV as the interim virus name on Jan 30, 2020. Even without the emails (which I'll share soon), we can infer from several public sources that WHO was averse to what the CSG was recommending published in the Nature paper: 1) the differences between the pre-print and final versions of the Nature paper, and 2) the language in the WHO communications in Feb 2020, 3) the current WHO page on the virus & disease names (linked in post above).
Why did WHO seem to want a far more generic name -- one that didn't place it in an existing "species"? Why did they use the language "the virus that causes COVID-19"? It's all very bizarre, especially when you consider this virus wasn't doing a darn thing in any data point of any kind until respective governing officials in various countries enacted plans and launched mass testing.
EDIT: WHO had started using 2019-nCoV around January 10, 2020. As far as I can tell, January 30, 2020 was their first more "formal" recommendation for an interim virus name. But, based on information in the CSG emails, we can see the recommendation for an interim name came AFTER the CSG had reached consensus about a name (i.e., SARS-CoV-2).