I think intent matters here. Spanish Flu is from so long ago it already has a universal name, whereas I think referring to COVID-19 as the Chinese virus is usually only done by people who'd like to blame China.
In what way does assigning any blame help? Magically US citizens will be able to successfully sue China for lost wages? Magically there will be less deaths?
Accountability matters. When things go wrong it's important to assign blame to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future.
So in this particular case, a way blaming might help would be to recognize those organizations and governments that were incapable of preventing the spread of the disease and to recognize in the future a quicker need to mitigate and not to assume China will take care of it, assuming China deserves blame. It may also help by recuperating the economic loss by holding those responsible for it and requiring payments. These are common things that happen in all walks of life and the international context is no different. People and countries shouldn't get to walk away from massive fuck ups if it is possible to hold them to account. At least we can try.
There are ways to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future, without assigning blame. Blameless post-mortem.
I'm a reasonable man, I find accountability a positive virtue. I'm also not a foolish one, for I understand trying to assign blame for an act of god is definitely NOT normal. And I understand the "blameless post-mortem" is a tech-industry standard well understood, so I am surprised to find the "blame game" card being played here. Consider:
Every time a hurricane rolls off the coast of west Africa and trashes the Eastern seaboard, you don't see the US blaming west Africa.
You don't see Missouri trying to pin the Joplin tornado onto neighboring Kansas/Oklahoma in order to recoup billions of dollars of damages and loss of human life. You DO get a technical NIST report that is blameless (I have worked with this particular data) [0].
When an earthquake originates in one country but flattens the city in a neighboring country, you don't see one sue the other.
When a typhoon hits SE Asia, they aren't trying to readily assign blame.
What can be assigned blame is a nation's reaction to this force majeure. At that point the people should be holding their own leaders accountable, as the assumption should always be that the neighbors are incompetent, and our own leaders are the best. That is inconvenient for the current President precisely because he politicized the disease. If he had not politicized it, his followers would be more amenable for blameless post-mortems (literal post-mortems, let's remember people are dying). Unfortunately his response was lackluster, and rather than taking accountability (you know, the virtue I agreed w/ y'all on at the beginning), he would rather shift blame. But this implies that he was relying on China to do its part. Which then begs the question: If the US President wants to blame China, why was he sitting back and relying on China on good faith when no other nation was?
To summarize why I don't believe the bullshit that is "assigning blame" for SARS-Cov-2:
- Accountability is a virtue
- Blameless postmortem is a huge cross-industry technical standard, so abandoning that is immediately suspect
- US President politicized the disease; due to this he has political motivations to avoid the virtue of accountability and how he guided the US response (making the act of "blaming" even more suspect as being a political reaction)
- Doublethink of "Did the US President really rely on the Chinese response? Blame them, not him!" (only enabled because of politicization)
There are ways to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future, without assigning blame. Blameless post-mortem. But that's now been politicized.
How do you prevent a hurricane? The coronavirus could have been stopped. The wildlife markets could have been shut down. The spread could have been prevented. The transparency could have been better. I'm not saying China actually does deserve blame, maybe it was way out of control before it was possible to do anything, but this has been a horrible disaster the likes we normally don't see and we need to do what we can to prevent it from ever happening again or if it does to handle it better. Blame is a useful tool, it feels like you're trying to avoid it for unstated reasons when it seems entirely useful in this context.