But why is it called that? It’s definitely not like King Henry VIII. Nope, there weren’t 18 different coronaviruses before this. That has nothing to do with the number 19. 

On the 31st of December, 2019, a strange pneumonia was reported to the Chinese WHO Country Office. A cluster of these cases originally appeared in Wuhan, a city in the Hubei Province of China. These infections were found to be caused by a new coronavirus which was given the name “2019 novel coronavirus” (2019-nCoV). 

A cluster of such cases originally appeared in Wuhan, a city in the Hubei Province of China. These infections were found to be caused by a new coronavirus which was given the name ‘2019 novel coronavirus’ or the COVID-19. 

COVID-19 is the name given by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the 11th of February, 2020 for the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. 

Initially, it was named SARS-CoV-2 because this coroavirus is a cousin of the virus which caused the SARS outbreak. (SARS-CoV). 

COVID-19 is an acronym that stands for coronavirus disease of 2019. ‘CO’ stands for corona, ‘Vi’ stands for virus and D stands for disease. The 19 stands for the year it was found in.

The name was changed to COVID-19 by the WHO ‘to enable discussion on disease prevention, spread, transmissibility, severity, and treatment’. 

So that’s the story of how the biggest pandemic of the last decade was named.