Editor’s note: Dr. William Miller, chief of staff at the Adventist Health Mendocino Coast Hospital, is writing weekly reports concerning the COVID-19 situation on the Mendocino Coast. We are pleased to be running his health column, with details on the medical fight against the pandemic. The views shared in this weekly column are those of the author, Dr. William Miller, and do not necessarily represent those of The Mendocino Voice or of Adventist Health.
There has been a tendency to name epidemics after where they were first discovered. An example is calling the 1918 influenza pandemic the “Spanish flu”, even though likely evolved in the United States. It was named that because Spain was the first country to freely admit that they had cases, while countries like the US kept the fact a secret out of fear that it would give intelligence information to its enemies during World War I. When it recurred in 1977 during the Cold War, we labeled it the “Russian flu”.
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