In So Many Words

When I first heard about COVID-19, my wife and I were at a writers’ conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It was February 11, 2020, and we were talking to a friend of Chinese descent who had just flown in from New York City. She told us she’d been nervous about crossing the border because during the SARS epidemic of 2002, she and other Asian travellers had been forced into quarantine and subjected to abuse after the outbreak was first identified in China’s most populous province, Guangdong. She was afraid of experiencing the same kind of racist backlash this time.

February 11 was, coincidentally, the day the World Health Organization decreed that the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 was to be called COVID-19 — a designation intended to avoid association with a specific geographical location, group of people, or animal species. Nonetheless, after Donald Trump insisted on referring...