These caused unmotivated fears, racism, misleading information, and fake news. As of October 2021, health authorities and researchers have classified two principal infodemic phenomena due to the use of improper disease names: i) stigmatization, which is the association of the disease’s characteristics to a specific ethnic group or social category, and ii) misidentification, which is the attribution of properties of other known diseases to the new disease. Naming a new human infectious disease is a relevant and complex public health issue. For these reasons, we suggest that the assignments of scientific names to new diseases are more timely and advise against mass media and international health authorities using terms linked to the geographical origin of the novel coronavirus 2019 variants. Furthermore, we also showed that early denominations influenced user behavior for a long time and were difficult to replace. Inappropriate names for cataloging novel coronavirus 2019 variants of concern have even been adopted by national health agencies. Our findings reveal the widespread use of multiple COVID-19-related names not considered in the previous literature, as well as a persistent trend in the adoption of stigmatizing and generic terms. To do this, we exploited the online tool Google Trends. In particular, we propose a new procedure to examine in detail the web interest of users in scientific and infodemic monikers linked to the identification of COVID-19. In this regard, we present a comprehensive infodemiological picture of Italy from the epidemic outbreak in December 2019 until September 2021. These monikers have fostered the spread of health disinformation and misinformation and fomented racism and segregation towards the Chinese population. Within the latter category, we find infodemic phenomena such as the adoption of generic and stigmatizing names used to identify COVID-19 and the related novel coronavirus 2019 variants. The damage caused by the new disease was direct (e.g., deaths) and indirect (e.g., closure of economic activities). The scientific community has classified COVID-19 as the worst pandemic in human history.
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