New crown pneumonia and the virus that caused the disease have been given different names.

Its virus was named SARS-CoV-2, and the disease caused by the virus was named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization.

The Coronavirus Research Group of the International Viral Classification Commission recently published a paper recommending that when referring to the virus and clinical diseases, do not mix names; and said that this way of naming diseases and viruses separately helps to distinguish between viruses and diseases Set a watershed.

On March 2, local time, the International Academic Journal (Nature Microbiology) published the aforementioned naming statement on the new coronavirus: The new coronavirus that caused the current outbreak of respiratory diseases was classified as a known species, and no new species was needed. The virus is named "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2" (SARS-CoV-2) because of its genetic similarity to the same virus based on SARS-CoV.

The name of this virus species comes from the original virus SARS-CoV that caused the outbreak of human respiratory diseases from 2002 to 2003, and the name of SARS-CoV comes from its related disease "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" (SARS).

Severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus species contain hundreds of known viruses that are mainly isolated from humans and bats. The SARS in the names of these viruses is intended to highlight their evolutionary relationship with the original virus, not the clinical disease level. There are currently 39 identified coronavirus species and 10 preliminary identified coronavirus species.

By comparing genomic data, specifically analyzing variations in conserved proteins involved in viral replication, researchers John Ziebuhr, Alexander Gorbalenya, and colleagues found that the new coronavirus belongs to the same cluster of viruses as the coronavirus related to severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Other research teams have also reported this relationship.

The two viruses are so similar that it is entirely possible to classify a new coronavirus into this known species without the need for a new species. It is also because of the genetic correlation between the new coronavirus and the SARS-associated coronavirus that the new coronavirus was named SARS-CoV-2.

The paper states that researchers should distinguish between SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks and the SARS-CoV epidemic from 2002 to 2003 in view of possible different disease characteristics and modes of transmission. But the two viruses are genetically very similar, and research on the links between the same viruses is recommended to better understand the biology and evolution of these human pathogens and their close relatives of coronaviruses that infect animals such as bats.

According to the China Science News, on January 31, the World Health Organization tentatively named the new crown virus 2019-nCoV on Twitter.

On February 8, the press conference of the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council of China introduced the new coronavirus-infected pneumonia collectively as "New coronavirus pneumonia", abbreviated as NCP, and the virus name was 2019-nCoV.

On February 9, Jiang Shibo and Shi Zhengli, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a paper in the journal Virologica Sinica (VS), co-sponsored by Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Society of Microbiology, suggesting that 2019-nCoV be renamed Ttransmissible acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, referred to as TARS-CoV.

On February 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the official name COVID-19 of New coronavirus pneumonia. Among them, CO stands for corona, VI stands for virus, D stands for disease, and 19 stands for year, which means "2019 New Coronavirus pneumonia". On the same day, the International Virus Classification Commission (ICTV) named New coronavirus pneumonia SARS-CoV-2.