Talk:SARS-CoV-2

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This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations:

Omer Benjakob (9 February 2020). "On Wikipedia, a fight is raging over coronavirus disinformation". Wired (magazine). Retrieved 9 February 2020. ... the article about the '2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak' was created on January 5, 2020. Four days later, a new article was spun off from it, dedicated solely to the 'Novel coronavirus' – officially known as 2019-nCoV. Yet another was created in February to detail the symptoms of the respiratory disease caused by the virus.
Mikael Thalen (24 March 2020). "Meet the Wikipedia editors fighting to keep coronavirus pages accurate". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 31 March 2020. Those pages include the Wikipedia article for the virus itself, known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, the disease it causes, COVID-19, and the ongoing global pandemic the coronavirus has caused.
Omer Benjakob (8 April 2020). "Why Wikipedia Is Immune to Coronavirus". Haaretz. Retrieved 10 April 2020. Asked by Haaretz to gauge the merits of the English-language article on the virus, Prof. Nadav Davidovitch, who heads the department of public health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, said he was 'pleasantly surprised by its quality.'

Text has been copied to or from this article; see the list below. The source pages now serve to provide attribution for the content in the destination pages and must not be deleted as long as the copies exist. For attribution and to access older versions of the copied text, please see the history links below.

Copied Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) (oldid, history) → 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease (diff) on 5 February 2020
Copied Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) (oldid, history) → 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease (diff) on 5 February 2020
Copied Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2#Strains and variants (oldid, history) → Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 variants (diff) on 23 December 2020

The contentious topics procedure applies to this article. This article relates to COVID-19.

There have been attempts to recruit editors of specific viewpoints to this article. If you've come here in response to such recruitment, please review the Wikipedia policies on canvassing and neutral point of view. Disputes on Wikipedia are resolved by consensus, not by majority vote.

WikiProject COVID-19 consensus

WikiProject COVID-19 aims to add to and build consensus for pages relating to COVID-19. They have so far discussed items listed below. Please discuss proposed improvements to them at the project talk page.

General

Superseded by TfD October 2020 and later practice - consult regular {{Current}} guidance.

Refrain from using Worldometer (worldometers.info) as a source due to common errors being observed as noted on the Case Count Task Force common errors page. (April 2020, April 2020)

For infoboxes on the main articles of countries, use Wuhan, Hubei, China for the origin parameter. (March 2020)

"Social distancing" is generally preferred over "physical distancing". (April 2020, May 2020)

Page title

COVID-19 (full caps) is preferable in the body of all articles, and in the title of all articles/category pages/etc.(RM April 2020, including the main article itself, RM March 2021).

SARS-CoV-2 (exact capitalisation and punctuation) is the common name of the virus and should be used for the main article's title, as well as in the body of all articles, and in the title of all other articles/category pages/etc. (June 2022, overturning April 2020)

Map

There is no consensus about which color schemes to use, but they should be consistent within articles as much as possible. There is agreement that there should be six levels of shading, plus gray for areas with no instances or no data. (May 2020)

There is no consensus about whether the legend, the date, and other elements should appear in the map image itself. (May 2020)

For map legends, ranges should use fixed round numbers (as opposed to updating dynamically). There is no consensus on what base population to use for per capita maps. (May 2020)

To ensure you are viewing the current list, you may wish to purge this page.

Moves, mentions, and copied material

This article has previously been nominated to be moved. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination.

Discussions

29 April 2020, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 → COVID-19 virus, Speedy close, consensus to not move (permalink)
12 March 2021, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 → SARS-CoV-2, Consensus to not move (permalink)
21 June 2022, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 → SARS-CoV-2, Moved (#Requested move 21 June 2022)
17 August 2022, SARS-CoV-2 → SARS coronavirus 2, Withdrawn (#Requested move 17 August 2022)

Older discussions

22 January 2020, Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) → Wuhan coronavirus, Consensus against moving (permalink)
31 January 2020, Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) → 2019-nCoV, Consensus to move to "2019 novel coronavirus" (permalink)
9 February 2020, 2019 novel coronavirus → 2019 Novel coronavirus, Speedy close, not moved (permalink)
11 February 2020, 2019 novel coronavirus → SARS-CoV-2, Speedy close, no consensus (permalink)
18 February 2020, 2019 novel coronavirus → Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, Moved (permalink)
16 March 2020, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 → COVID-19 virus, WP:SNOW closed, not moved (permalink)
24 April 2020, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 → SARS coronavirus 2, Withdrawn by nominator, not moved (permalink)

Current consensus

NOTE: It is recommended to link to this list in your edit summary when reverting, as:
[[Talk:SARS-CoV-2#Current consensus|current consensus]] item [n]
To ensure you are viewing the current list, you may wish to purge this page.

1. There is consensus that the terms "Wuhan virus" or "China virus" should not be used in the Lead of the article. The terms and their history can be discussed in the body of the article. (April 2020)

The classification box needs a couple more ranks

It needs suborder Cornidovirineae below order Nidovirales, as well as subfamily Orthocoronavirinae below family Coronaviridae.

Source: https://ictv.global/taxonomy

204.197.183.234 (talk) 16:30, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's not the norm to display non-principal ranks in the taxobox on virus articles. Usually "sub" taxa only appear in the virusbox when it's the taxon's article and taxon= is set to suborder/subfamily/etc. or if it's the taxon immediately below (such as genus) and the parent taxon is a "sub" rank. Velayinosu (talk) 00:19, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I figure considering subgenus Sarbecovirus is shown in the box, then subfamily Orthocoronavirinae should be there as well to make it consistent.

~2025-31283-02 (talk) 21:02, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Need to add more synonyms in the infobox

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Currently, only 2019-nCoV is listed. A brief look on NCBI shows a bunch more synonyms as follows:

2019-nCoV, COVID-19 virus, SARS2, Human coronavirus 2019, HCoV-19, SARS-2, SARS-CoV2

Source: [1]

~2025-34995-11 (talk) 02:55, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done Smallangryplanet (talk) 10:44, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 7 December 2025

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

The R0 value for Omicron Post-BA.4/5 (B.1.1.529.4/5) is stated to be ~20 based on sources 180 and 181. Source 180 states this value in its introduction, but provides no citation for it and does not specifically research the R0 value. Source 181 states the R0 value is significantly increased, but does not provide a specific value. A Reuters fact check on the issue (https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/no-evidence-omicron-ba5-is-more-infectious-than-measles-or-is-the-most-infecti-idUSL1N2YW1T0/) also claims the original calculations which this number is likely derived from are flawed. ~2025-39055-60 (talk) 11:23, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Day Creature (talk) 15:17, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For example, request that those sources be tagged as {{failed verification}} in the first instance, to give editors an opportunity to replace them. Then, if nothing emerges within a couple of weeks, request deletion of the assertions that they claim to support. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:28, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Two Wiki pages disagree about the size of Covid-19 virus particles.

The Wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2#Virus_structure ) states that individual virus particles are 6140 nanometers diameter, but another Wiki page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Structure states: "Their size is highly variable with average diameters of 80 to 120 nm. Extreme sizes are known from 50 to 200 nm in diameter." Other sources I found agree with a nominal figure of 100 nm. For example, this Nature article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-04182-3) states, "Coronaviruses are membrane-enveloped RNA viruses with a diameter of 80 to 140 nm." And this Univ. British Columbia page (https://www.aerosol.mech.ubc.ca/what-size-particle-is-important-to-transmission/ ) lists the diameter as 0.1 micron, which is 100 nm. Best wishes and happy editing. ~2025-40565-03 (talk) 01:16, 14 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for pointing this out. This is actually supposed to say 60-140, consistent with the ranges you've found (and the cited source which says Diameter varied from about 60 to 140 nm). For some reason the conversion template was set to spell out the numbers (ie sixty–one hundred and forty), which is unusual for values this large and creates ambiguity. I just changed it back to 60-140 to avoid confusion. Jamedeus (talk) 01:46, 14 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Tsarivan613 if I'm reading your summary right it looks like you changed it to avoid in) in, which is also confusing. To be honest I'm not sure we need a conversion here at all (10⁻⁶ inches doesn't really clarify anything) and removing it would fix both issues. Any objection? Jamedeus (talk) 02:03, 14 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks you are correct. Looking back there was a better way to do this with abbr=off. I agree that the conversion can be taken out. The original poster has a good point on size, which tends to vary in enveloped viruses to my understanding. Tsarivan613 (talk) 07:49, 14 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Great I just removed it, sorry for the delay getting back to this. Jamedeus (talk) 01:59, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]