From the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that the practices of naming the disease, its nature and its handling by the health authorities, the news media and the politicians had social and ideological implications. This article presents a sociosemiotic study of such practices as reflected in a corpus of headlines of eight newspapers of four countries in the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis. After an analysis of the institutional naming choices of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, the study focuses on the changes in newspapers’ naming patterns following the WHO’s announcement of the disease name on 11 February 2020. A subsequent political controversy related to naming in the United States is then examined in reports of The New York Times and The Washington Post as a further illustration of how public discourses and perceptions can rapidly evolve in the context of health crises.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 及其致病病毒的机构和新闻媒体名称：在命名政策和命名政治之间

从 COVID-19 全球大流行开始，很明显，卫生当局、新闻媒体和政治家命名该疾病、其性质及其处理方式的做法具有社会和意识形态影响。本文介绍了对此类做法的社会符号学研究，这些做法反映在 COVID-19 危机早期阶段的四个国家的八份报纸的头条新闻中。在分析了世界卫生组织 (WHO) 和国际病毒分类委员会的机构命名选择后，该研究重点关注了世界卫生组织于 2020 年 2 月 11 日宣布疾病名称后报纸命名模式的变化。