During an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway suggested there were 18 other coronaviruses before COVID-19. "This is COVID-19 not COVID-1, folks," she said, implying that the World Health Organization did a bad job at warning the world about the virus. "You would think that people charged with the World Health Organization facts and figures would be on top of that. This is just a pause right now," she added.
COVID-19 is named as such because it first emerged near the end of 2019, not because it was the 19th coronavirus discovered by the WHO. "Following WHO best practices for naming of new human infectious diseases, which were developed in consultation and collaboration with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), WHO has named the disease COVID-19, short for 'coronavirus disease 2019,'" the WHO noted in its Feb. 11 Situation Report.
Curiously, Conway took something of a different tone with reporters at the White House after her appearance on Fox News. "It's called COVID-19; not COVID-20," she told reporters, indicating that she was either informed of her mistake or she intentionally misled Fox News viewers. "It originated in 2019 even though the WHO called it a global pandemic sometime in March of 2020. So they knew for a while and they dragged their feet it looks like."
Needless to say, Twitter was not impressed by what she said. Many used the opportunity to call her out, while others came up with subtitles for what appears to be a coronavirus film franchise. See what Twitter had to say about Conway's comments below.
