From the guidelines and details provided by WHO, every name/virus has a name which contains its details (it’s meaning and its origination), so that they can go down in history that created a pandemic disease such as the one we the world are going through.
So, COVID-19, “COVI” refers to the disease-causing corona virus, “D” stands for disease and 19 represents the year 2019, when the first case of the disease was reported. The causative virus has been named SARS-CoV-2, short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2.
Pertinently, the WHO had initially assigned a temporary name to the disease, viz. “2019-nCoV”, as an immediate measure to prevent people from assigning it reprehensible names; inspired from the place of its origin— Wuhan.
The guidelines also specifically provide that the following factors should be avoided while naming a disease:
Geographic location speculated to be the place of origin of the disease (such as the Spanish Flu, the Bombay plague, etc.);
People’s names (for instance the Chagas disease named after Brazilian physician Carlos Chagas, who discovered the disease caused by kissing bugs in 1909);
Causative species of animal or food (like swine flu, bird flu, etc.);
Cultural, population, industry or occupational references;
Terms that incite undue fear (like a fatal, epidemic, etc., however, the word “severe” may be used for diseases having a very high “initial case fatality rate”)
Inter alia, the guidelines stipulate that names should be short and easy to pronounce, and should have evaluated all potential acronyms. The name COVID-19 was made official by the WHO on February 11, 2020.