Does It Matter What We Call a Disease?

The very names of such diseases are felt to have a magic power. — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978)

It took six weeks for the World Health Organization to bestow a name on the new viral respiratory disease that emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan, China: COVID-19, an acronym for COronaVIrus Disease 2019. The naming process was slow and deliberate because of WHO disease-naming guidelines released in 2015, which rule out eponyms (diseases named for people, such as Down syndrome or Alzheimer’s disease), place names (such as Lyme disease or West Nile virus), and…