Charting the Spread of “Wuhan Virus”

The name. Not the virus.

President Trump recently began calling the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19 “Chinese virus.” Asked about his use of the term, which at least anecdotally fuels prejudice against ethnic minorities, Trump insisted it could not be racist “because [the virus] comes from China. I want to be accurate.” In the middle of a pandemic, the White House is picking fights about what the pandemic should be called.

Trump’s defenders argue that “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese coronavirus” have always been common terms for COVID-19. Mainstream media has used similar terms in the past, and according to conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller, the terms only became labeled “racist” due to “journalists working for international news networks who have millions invested into Beijing.”

Some went further, calling the disease the “Kung Flu.” Here’s Resurgent editor Erick Erickson, who later thought better of it and deleted this tweet:

It doesn’t take a conspiracy to explain why an Asian American reporter might feel insulted when a White House staffer uses the term “Kung Flu” to her face.

But is the right-wing argument true? Was everyone using terms like “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese coronavirus” until China dictated otherwise?

No. And I have data to prove it.

Naming the Disease

As Dylan Scott at Vox observes, Trump used the terms “COVID-19” and “coronavirus” (without a geographic adjective) at least 40 times since January before suddenly switching on March 16.

I scrapped Twitter for uses of “Wuhan virus” and related terms to figure out how this began. Among verified Twitter accounts, some used geography-based terms in January, but by early February they had all but disappeared.

This is unsurprising. After the World Health Organization (WHO) officially named COVID-19 on February 11, other terms faded, especially misleading terms like “Wuhan flu.” As a result, “Wuhan virus” went virtually out of circulation for 45 days of the disease’s brief existence.

So what changed on March 9? First, Republican Congressman Paul Gosar announced he was under self-quarantine after interacting with a “Wuhan Virus” patient at the CPAC convention. (Tweet times are in UTC, so Rep. Gosar’s Sunday evening tweet is March 9 in these graphs.)

In response, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called the expression “incredibly gross,” and he was quickly joined by David Gura and Molly Jong Fast, both of whom called it flatly “racist,” each garnering tens of thousands of likes.

The racism proposition turned out to be a powerful “scissors statement.” Many on the left found the racism of “Wuhan virus” self-evident, while many on the right found it just as obviously not racist. This culture war skirmish can be seen in the chart below, which plots how many tweets with the geographic terms for COVID-19 also include words like “racist,” “bigot,” “xenophobic,” and “stigmatizing.” The orange-coded tweets are talking about the geographic terms, asserting or denying that they’re racist, and do not appear in significant numbers until March 9.

Verified users who tweeted “Wuhan virus,” “Chinese virus” and similar terms most frequently over the next week include the conservative blog RedState (151 tweets) and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec (46). RedState’s Twitter account had never used one of these terms prior to March 9, and Posobiec had not since February 3.

Usage spiked again after Donald Trump further popularized the term “Chinese virus,” tweeting it for the first time on March 16. Trump’s tweet has the most likes (325,000) and retweets (72,000) of any tweet to use “Chinese virus” or similar terms. The only tweet even close to this influence is Trump’s encore on March 17.

Whether or not anyone saying “Chinese virus” intends it as racist, the term is now used almost exclusively by conservatives who don’t mind arguing against commentary that it harms racial minorities.

Some conservatives might argue that this proves their point. After all, didn’t the media once use the term frequently before suddenly turning to attack Rep. Gosar, President Trump, and other conservatives? No, not really:

This chart shows the number of references to “Chinese coronavirus” and related terms compared to just “coronavirus” through January 22, when there were already more than 10,000 “coronavirus” tweets by verified users daily.

Yes, “coronavirus” was not always standard. For the first few days of the outbreak in Wuhan, no one knew for sure what the disease was. The first name given to it in English-language sources appears to be “Wuhan Pneumonia,” although it was also called “Wuhan flu” and “Wuhan virus.” The hashtag #WuhanSARS was blocked by Chinese authorities in early January, causing this term to trend briefly in English. But as the chart below shows, “coronavirus” took over by January 7 when WHO confirmed early reports that the disease was indeed caused by a new strain of coronavirus:

Colloquial usage seems to have followed exactly the same trends as the verified account tweets plotted above. While I’m unable to scrape the millions of “coronavirus” tweets, this plot shows all tweets employing the terms “Chinese coronavirus,” “Chinese virus,” and “Wuhan virus” compared to an extrapolation of the misspellings “caronavirus” and “corona virus” prior to the disease’s name becoming culture war fodder on March 9.

The misspelled tweets easily dominate all three geographic terms put together (which have only about 50,000 total tweets in the month before March 7), so we can be sure “coronavirus” was organically the most common term by a country mile.

Google trends shows the same thing. More people are currently searching for the misspelling “caronavirus” than ever searched for “Wuhan virus.” And correctly-spelled searches for “COVID-19” and “coronavirus” easily surpass all of these terms.

“Coronavirus” (without nationality) has been the most common term for the disease since January 7, 2020, rivaled only by the official name “COVID-19.” This isn’t because of Chinese influence or overly woke media talking heads — it’s been the natural and obvious way to talk about the disease almost from the beginning.

Anyone who insists otherwise is wrong.