[Scoundreller]

Heh, I was trying to do research on coronaviruses (of which COVID-19 is one of many coronaviruses), but Google sanitized the result and only showed me "official" COVID-19 resources and buried the broader coronavirus resources.

https://www.google.com/search?q=coronavirus

[stolenmerch]

COVID-19 isn't a coronavirus, it's the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

[ganstyles]

Giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assuming this isn't just pedantry, especially since you're getting downvotes (because I assume everyone thinks this is just pedantic correction) I looked it up.

In the context of "trying to do research on coronaviruses" your comment appears to be not only correct but an important distinction, rather than the pedantry it appears to be.

From Wikipedia: "...more lethal varieties [of coronaviruses] can cause SARS, MERS, and COVID-19."

And...

"Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-CoV-2] is the strain of coronavirus..."

I learned something today!

[ccheney]

I also had this epiphany awhile back and what helped me understand the difference was to think about how HIV (the virus) causes AIDS (the disease).

[teamspirit]

Further, CoViD-19 literally stands for: Co[rona] Vi[rus] D[isease] - [discovered in 20]19 - "D" standing for disease caused by this particular strain.

To be honest, I was a bit disappointed when I found out, though I admit now it's a little refreshing to have be so simply named.

[Theodores]

Which can be further abbreviated as C19. I have seen this in personal chats and wonder how long it will be before it gets into newspaper headlines where space is at a premium in print editions.

[Wistar]

I already see it in publications but more frequently see the variant C-19.

[jkoudys]

Complaining about pedantry is the new pedantry.

[acituan]

I know you are relaying the public information accurately, but I wish authorities pushed better names. Like calling the virus "the virus that we know has a corona and causes these symptoms" and the disease "the disease caused by this virus that has a corona and that causes these symptoms" is circular. Also, it is not true that it is entirely a respiratory syndrome. There are serious non-respiratory symptoms, extent of which we are to discover. Finally, if it is a syndrome causing virus, by definition we wouldn't have the crisp boundaries of a disease around it, which indeed we don't.

If these were names for services and classes that came in a code review, how many would really approve?

[pwdisswordfish2]

American media calls both disease and virus "corona". They seem to care little about such details.

[perl4ever]

I've been using "covid". Don't know if it will catch on, but I feel it's important for efficiency's sake to try to save one letter.

[docbrown]

[retracted] and I hope this is just a misunderstanding. As the director of the World Health Organization (WHO) said, 2019-nCoV is a novel (new) coronavirus.[0] The CDC defines coronavirus as a virus that was not previously known — check the FAQ, “what is a novel coronavirus?”[0.5]

They changed the name of this coronavirus to reflect the disease more accurately to COVID-19.[1]

The CDC has a list of other coronavirus’ that have existed.[2]

0: https://twitter.com/DrTedros/status/1227297754499764230?s=20

0.5: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html

1: https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...

2: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/types.html

——

Edit: Since there seems to be a misunderstanding from everybody’s part on this as it’s referred to as both and often interchangeably in a mainstream setting, take a look at John Hopkins guide: https://www.hopkinsguides.com/hopkins/view/Johns_Hopkins_ABX...

[okintheory]

No, the comment above is correct, and your own links show this.

From link [2]: "SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus that causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19)"

The previous comment was just making the point that the (new) virus is called SARS-CoV-2 and the associated disease is called COVID-19.

[COVIDisntCORONA]

Excuse the incivility, but no.

COVID-19: disease caused by SARS-CoV-2

SARS-CoV-2: strain of SARS-CoV

SARS-CoV: severe accute respiratory syndrome coronavirus

Coronavirus: virus that causes respiratory diseases in mammals, such as SARS (SARS-CoV) MERS (MERS-CoV), and COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2)

[tacon]

>SARS-CoV-2: strain of SARS-CoV

Excuse the incivility, but no. SARS-CoV-2 is not a strain or type of SARS-CoV. The viruses share ancestors, but SARS-CoV-2 did not come directly from SARS-CoV. SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are in the category of beta coronaviruses[0].

"The whole genome-based phylogenetic analysis presented that two Bat SARS-like CoVs (ZXC21 and ZC45) were the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2."[1]

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0817/9/3/240/htm

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/pathogens/pathogens-09-00240/article_de...

[COVIDisntCORONA]

Excuse the incivility once again, but no.

While we're on the topic of linguistic pedantary, strain isn't exclusive to direct mutations from a parent genome. Strains, like much of biological taxonomy, are a human abstraction to make communication of the idea of -- in this case -- "a virus sharing similar properties to coronaviruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome" -- albeit this is a very simplified definition for the sake of brevity.

SARS is caused by SARS-CoV-1 and COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2.

Rather, if we would like to be absolutely correct about these classifications, we would say SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 are both strains of SARSr-CoV (Severe accute respiratory syndrome related coronavirus), which in itself is a species, an abstract concept used to group related organisms into a convenient umbrella term.

There is no "eukaryote" organism the same way there is no "SARSr-CoV" organism. The added "r" was a recent addition when COVID-19 was discovered.

I will cede that I didn't specify this last point, and you were correct to point it out.

[egberts1]

Wow. A civil exchange on proper use of terms by two disparate but related technological domain experts. It’ll go on forever.

[tacon]

>we would say SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 are both strains of SARSr-CoV

Thank you for making my point, again.

[ArnoVW]

I'll add that the family of viruses is called Corona virus because they are 'crown shaped'

[amelius]

Kind of strange that the name of the virus contains the symptoms of the disease (SARS = severe accute respiratory syndrome) while the disease doesn't.

[rczhang]

You can just search for 'Coronaviridae' instead. The overwhelming majority of people searching for coronavirus want pandemic news.

[pwdisswordfish2]

"Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?"

There was "rebranded" web search that someone created a number of years ago and posted on HN that aimed to exclude the top websites from results. I cannot remember the name he gave to the project.

One way to exclude the world's biggest websites when using Google is to restrict the search to TLDs other than .com, .net and .org. The root zone is full of silly new TLDs that no one uses for large websites. There are hundreds to choose from.

https://www.google.com/search?q=coronavirus+site:edu

Looks like Google Scholar is including a number of "coronavirus links" on the main page but thankfully not in the results.

https://scholar.google.com

https://scholar.google.com/search?q=coronavirus

Why not skip Google and "web search" and use a database that does not include all the crap one finds on the www

Something like

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov?term=coronavirus

or

https://search.crossref.org/?q=coronavirus

[ikeyany]

In that case, I would omit webpages from the past year.

[drran]

Try http://biomed-sanity.com/ .

[nojito]

Why would Google showcase non official sources?

[40four]

It is kind of funny that we talk about SARS-COV-2 as if it is the only coronavirus. Coronavirus, singular. If I’m not mistaken the common cold is in the corona virus family.

[computerfriend]

The common cold is caused by coronaviruses and rhinoviruses. The skew is heavily towards rhinoviruses.

[40four]

Rhinovirus, that’s right. Thanks. I saw an article recently about colds caused by coronaviruses so it was fresh in my head.