4.1. Terms Shared across Media
Using the extent to which terms are shared across media channels as a criterion, the 16 terms fall into three groups. We look first at names shared by state, commercial, and social media (
Section 4.1.1), and then at those shared across commercial and social media with no references in state media (
Section 4.1.2). The remaining four names and their distributions are discussed in the third section (
Section 4.1.3).
4.1.1. Shared across All Media
The six terms shared across the three media, state, commercial, and social are, in order of frequency:
No. 5 “New coronavirus pneumonia”;
No. 4 “New type pneumonia”;
No. 1 “Novel coronavirus pneumonia”;
No. 2 “Pneumonia caused by novel coronavirus”;
No. 3 “Novel viral pneumonia”; and
No. 14 “China pneumonia”.
The data presented in
Table 3 make clear that in terms of frequency, the six terms fall into two groups, one group of three terms with very high frequency of occurrence and a second group of three with much lesser frequencies. The first group of three had two members with high frequencies of close to two million total occurrences and one member with an outstanding position of more than four million. This high number was for name No. 5.
Xīnguān fèiyán, “New coronavirus pneumonia”. An example of this name appears later in the results section. Here we give an example of another member of the high frequency group, name No. 1
Xīnxíng guānzhuàng bìngdú fèiyán, “Novel coronavirus pneumonia”, which was found in the People’s Daily dated 7 February 2020, just before the publication of the official coronavirus name by the WHO:
(1) Yīwèi xīnxíng guānzhuàng bìngdú fèiyán zhìyùzhě de zhēnshí tǐhuì.
“The real experience of a person cured of Novel coronavirus pneumonia.”
(Rénmín wǎng; People’s Daily Online, 7 February 2020)
Total weekly frequencies among the members of the second group, in contrast, varied between 300,000 and 3,000. Name No. 2, Xīnxíng guānzhuàng bìngdú gǎnrǎn de fèiyán, “Pneumonia caused by novel coronavirus”, was introduced around 19 January by the NHCC and taken up by other official institutions, for instance, the National Health Commission of Wuhan (NHCW). Official names generally were announced in the form of a letter or a press conference, and around 19 January it was known that we were dealing with a “coronavirus”, guānzhuàng bìngdú ‘, that was xīnxíng, “novel”, causing fèiyán, “pneumonia” and was probably gǎnrǎn, “contagious”. An example taken from China Youth Net on 20 January 2020 illustrates its use:
(2) Xīnxíng guānzhuàng bìngdú gǎnrǎn de fèiyán yǒu nǎxiē zhèngzhuàng? Chángtú jiědú lái le.
“What are the symptoms of Pneumonia caused by the novel coronavirus? Here comes the interpretation of the long picture.”
(Zhōngguó Qīngnián Wǎng; China Youth Net, 20 January 2020)
Table 3 further demonstrates that the usage of these six terms was not equally shared across the three media types. Close to equal sharing existed between state and commercial for the most frequent term, No. 5 “New coronavirus pneumonia”, with 42% and 44% for these two media, respectively. As these figures indicate the high-frequency name was less popular on social media with a figure no higher than 14%. For all six terms, the commercial sites represented the widest use. The commercial media percentages were, from high to low, for No. 3 “Novel viral pneumonia” 70%, No. 2 “Pneumonia caused by novel coronavirus” 60%, and an equal 55% for No. 1 “Novel coronavirus pneumonia” and No. 14 “China pneumonia”, and finally, No. 4 “New type pneumonia” with 50%.
No. 14. “China pneumonia”, the least frequently used term of all six, interestingly, occurred more frequently in state media with 28% than in social media with 17%, a difference that needs further scrutiny, which is done in the next section where we present data of frequency development for each of the 16 names across time.
4.1.2. Shared by Commercial and Social Networks
Commercial and social networks, too, shared six terms. For clarity, none of these six terms were found in official state-controlled media. The six terms of this type were in the following order of frequency:
No. 7 “Novel coronavirus”;
No. 8 “Wuhan pneumonia”;
No. 15 COVID-19;
No. 16. NCP;
No. 12 “Wild animal pneumonia”; and
No. 9 “Wu P”.
As shown in
Table 4, the total of the average weekly frequencies of these terms ranged from 161,000 to 1000. Name No.9
Wǔfèi, the shortened form of No. 8.
Wǔhàn fèiyán, “Wuhan pneumonia”, had an eight-week total frequency of 124,000. The top daily frequency among the six shared items of this selection was for name No. 7
Xīnguān, “Novel coronavirus”, with a total weekly frequency of 161,000. Name No. 12
Yěwèi fèiyán, “Wild animal pneumonia”, ended up at the lower end of these data with a total frequency of 22,000. The two English terms, No. 15 COVID-19 and No. 16 NCP, had frequencies of, respectively, 90,000 and 60,000, taking up the middle position among these six terms shared by commercial companies and social media.
Four of these six disease names were more widely used in commercial sources. Outstanding among these were the two English terms, COVID-19 and NCP, with a majority occurrence of 85% in commercial environments. A closer look showed that their uses were mainly supported by Chinese language media predominantly intended for a Taiwanese or North American Chinese audience, such as the popular channel “Los Angeles Life Interaction”. Terms No. 7 “Novel coronavirus” and No. 8 “Wuhan pneumonia”, too, were dominantly used in commercial media with 68% and 58%, respectively, allowing social media one-third to almost half of the traced occurrences. In contrast, No. 12 “Wild animal pneumonia” was used somewhat more extensively in social media with 56%, showing social awareness of the often-quoted wet market origin of the new virus. Equal distribution across both media was the case for the, less frequently used, name No. 9 Wǔfèi “Wu P(neumonia)”, reflecting a certain but limited need for very short and easy to use terms in both nonofficial media.
4.1.3. The Remaining Four Disease Names
Of the remaining four disease names, three were mainly used in official media, whereas one little-used term occurred in social media exchanges only. The four names in terms of frequencies were:
No. 13 “Unknown viral pneumonia”;
No. 11 “Viral pneumonia caused by wild animals”;
No. 6 “New viral pneumonia” and;
No. 10 Hànfèi “Han P(neumonia)”.
The data listed in
Table 5 show that the total numbers varied between three-thousand-two-hundred and nineteen occurrences. The social media data contained one term that was not used by any of the other two media, state or commercial. This term was an easy choice for social media participants, those who can read and write Chinese that is. The term was not used by state-sponsored and commercial sites, probably because this abbreviation shares a high degree of similarity with local hospitals’ names, such as Wuhan Pulmonary Disease Hospital, short for “Hanfei”.
The first of the names in
Table 5, No. 13
Bùmíng yuányīn bìngdúxìng fèiyán, “Unknown viral pneumonia”, was an official name and not reported by any commercial site. “State” had a strong majority stake of 82%. It was shared to some extent by social media. This is one of the early state-designed disease names, reflecting the discovery of a new, “unknown” yet, coronavirus. The name was only marginally supported by users of social media and neglected by commercial sites. Businesses probably do not like the term “unknown”, which sounds not very business-like. In business environments things tend to have clear sources and straight forward values. Here is an example of its use taken from the Sina.com website dated 6 January 2020:
(3) Wǔhàn wèihé xiàn bùmíng yuányīn bìngdúxìng fèiyán? Shìjíkòng zhōngxīn huíyìng “Wǔhànshì wèijiànwěi guānyú bùmíng yuányīn de bìngdúxìng fèiyán qíngkuàng tōngbào”
“Why is there ‘Unknown viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan? The Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention responded to the ‘Notice of Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on Unknown viral pneumonia’”
(Xīnlàng Wǎng; Sina.com, 6 January 2020) (The use of the subordinating particle de in the second quote of the disease name makes that into a descriptive term more than a disease name.)
The status of term No. 11 Yěwèi bìngdú fèiyán, “Viral pneumonia caused by wild animals”, was shared by state-sponsored and commercial media with a majority of 60% for use in official sites. This result is puzzling, since it is not an official term, but its use in official media is related to its appearance in the CCTV News program “CCTV Comment” on 23 January 2020. In that program, it was stated that some netizens by selecting this term wished to warn others about the danger of eating game food and encouraged them “to refuse to eat wild animals”. The program also expressed the view that “the virus should be named more scientifically”. The main point, however, was that it urged people to learn from the Yěwèi bìngdú fèiyán, “Viral pneumonia caused by wild animals” case.
This report was reprinted and reposted in large numbers by other mainstream media such as People’s Daily Online, Sina.com, Tencent.com, and others, and was followed and discussed on Weibo. Within four days, the number of Weibo comments on this topic reached 2756. As a result of this, the spread of name No. 11 is different from other nonofficial name varieties, meaning that critical reports by mainstream media are a factor affecting the spread of disease name varieties.
The last term supported by state sponsored media, name No. 6 Xīndú fèiyán, “New viral pneumonia”, is a four-character name abbreviated from Xīnguān, “new corona”, and bìngdú, “virus, combining the first and the last character of these two words to create the abbreviation Xīndú, “new viral”. This new term was not taken up by netizens and was only used by commercial sites in 29% of the cases noted, showing the strong preference for this term by state media, which were responsible for the remaining 71% of its total frequency.
The main force behind the acceptance and spread of the 16 new disease names were commercial websites. Chinese governmental sites created or accepted nine of the 19 terms but, with the exception of three, the most frequently used six names (
Table 3) were in the majority employed by commercial sites. The three remaining official terms were less frequently used (
Table 5). Social media excelled in one term only, name No. 10
Hànfèi, “Han P”; it further shared one term with commercial sites, name No. 9
Wǔfèi, “Wu P”, and used one other term dominantly, No.12
Yěwèi fèiyán, “Wild animal pneumonia”.
4.2. Disease Names across Time
For each of the sixteen disease names studied, statistics of daily frequencies and weekly averages are available. The frequencies quoted in the previous section were the total scores of the weekly averages across an eight-week period or across the number of weeks of actual use. In this section, we will use the daily frequencies to compare the timelines of the 16 names we selected. Each timeline characterizes the occurrence and development of the frequency of use of a disease name. For instance, the maximum frequency disease name No. 5 Xīnguān fèiyán, “New coronavirus pneumonia”, first appeared on 18 January and soon thereafter on the 23rd reached a peak of 200,000 occurrences, a peak moment which coincided with the official announcement of the Wuhan lockdown.
That announcement occurred at 2 o’clock in the morning of that day signaling the urgency of the situation. The announcement stated that the lockdown would take effect at 10 o’clock that same day, which must have caused great anxiety among both the local and wider population. This is particularly understandable when it is realized that the lockdown and limitation of movement occurred two days before the Chinese New Year celebrations of that year. In that context, it is understandable that together with the encompassing chaos, a flood of urgent and frantic interpersonal communications appeared.
The following two weeks saw increasing use of name No. 5 “New coronavirus pneumonia” at levels of several hundred thousand hits a day, at the end of which reaching a level of one million. With ups and downs, name No. 5 “New coronavirus pneumonia” remained on that high a level until the end of the observation period. All media types confirmed its use with state and commercial media contributing most of the data (
Table 3;
Figure 2).
Name No. 5′s configuration, slow build-up, and remaining high level was quite unique and can only be compared with the much later occurrence of the international official name for the new virus disease, COVID-19, name No. 15 in our data, which appeared after 11 February and remained in use at a somewhat lower but relatively high level of 10,000 to 20,000 daily occurrences. The term was not used by official media in China, since they are required to use the official Chinese names. Commercial and social media do not have such restrictions.
Here is an example of the use of COVID-19 in a Chinese text. The example was taken from the Wǎngyì xīnwén news site, which is run by NetEase Inc., a Chinese technology company providing online services centered on content. The company is listed at the Nasdaq stock exchange. The example reads:
(4) Dào jīntiān, quánqiú 180 duō gè guójiā dōu yǐjīng bàogào le COVID-19 bìnglì.
“As of today, more than 180 countries around the world have reported COVID-19 cases.”
(Wǎngyì xīnwén, ‘Net-ease News’, 22 March 2020)
In contrast to the two high daily frequency timelines, No. 5 and No. 15, disease name No. 4 Xīnxíng fèiyán, “New type pneumonia”, which was the first official name for the disease and first appeared in our data at 30 December 2019, has a quite different timeline pattern. We characterize this pattern as rise-and-fall and found that six other items, five Chinese and one English name, shared this pattern. Together these seven timelines represent 44% of the data.
Name No. 4 “New type pneumonia” reached a peak during the 23 January lockdown event at a level of 800,000 occurrences. It was, during that national emergency, the most frequently used term in all our data. After it reached its peak level, the usage tops slowly decreased to lower levels of 700,000, 500,000, and 400,000, reaching the latter level in the middle of February. Thereafter its use continued but at much lower levels. Its frequent use was supported by all media in the order commercial, social, and state (
Table 3).
The five remaining Chinese coronavirus-related pneumonia names with a rise-and fall pattern were attested between 31 December 2019 and 23 January 2020. These early names were taken up by different protagonists in different segments of the media, while new names too started to circulate as soon as more insight about the disease was obtained. The next in line with a rise-and-fall pattern is name No. 8
Wǔhàn fèiyán, “Wuhan pneumonia”, which appeared in our data as early as 31 December 2019. The name remained dormant in our data until 23 January, when its usage jumped to a level of 90,000 hits. After that day, the frequency of use started to fall, reaching another small peak at 4 February of 40,000 before continuing to fall further to much lower levels of frequency (
Figure 2). No. 8 “Wuhan pneumonia” was shared by commercial and social media and not used in official media. This is one of the first indications that Chinese governance is more oriented on international standards than on the needs of their own population (
Table 5).
A related term is name No. 12
Yěwèi fèiyán, “Wild animal pneumonia”, which became a popular name after the role of Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market in the spread of the virus became an issue. The name was attested on 1 January. It jumped to a daily frequency use of 18,000 hits at 23 January, the lockdown announcement. The name had a relatively short support span and fell back to much lower levels after a week and continued that downward trend thereafter. It, too, was only supported by social and commercial oriented media, another indication of the orientation of official governance on international standards rather than on the communicative needs of Chinese citizens. The order this time was reversed with a majority use of 56% for social media (
Table 4).
A similar, short-time-span fate awaited disease name No. 11
Yěwèi bìngdú fèiyán, “Viral pneumonia caused by wild animals”, a term more explicit than its predecessor No. 12
Yěweì fèiyán by the addition of the disease source
bìngdú, “virus”. The term, as mentioned, got this more explicit name during its introduction in a CCTV program which created a short-term audience effect in the sense that other sources reported on this TV event. It only found a following in commerce-oriented sites and was not reported by social media (
Table 5). The term was attested for the first time at 22 January, reached a maximum level of 3000 hits after which it fell back to a much lower level of 500 occurrences, and thereafter basically disappeared. Despite its official support, the No. 11
Yěwèi bìngdú fèiyán pneumonia name, in terms of frequency, merely had a marginal existence.
The next term of the rise-and-fall pattern is disease name No. 3
Xīnxíng bìngdú fèiyán, “Novel virus pneumonia”, which was attested as early as 9 January and was shared by all three media environments, while commerce-oriented media dominated its use. The name was only marginally supported by official and social media for a maximum of close to one-third of all occurrences for both state and social media combined (
Table 3). The term hit a maximum of 6000 occurrences during the 23 January lockdown event, but after one week had fallen back to 2000 and slowly moved to lower levels until the end of the observation period in the middle of March, by which time it had basically disappeared in the data.
The last of the six Chinese rise-and-fall disease names is No. 10
Hànfèi, “Han P(neumonia)”, which appeared in social media on 21 January and reached its maximum of six occurrences during the 23 January lockdown event. It was neglected by official and commercial sites (
Table 5). The name was invented by netizens looking for a short term that could cover all occurrences; a marginal but interesting example of name-giving developed by netizens in interaction with other site participants. The latter obviously did not like the term and basically ignored it (
Figure 2).
The seventh and last term of the rise-and-fall type in our data is the English disease name No. 16 “NCP”, the English language abbreviation for “Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia”. The use of NCP was predominantly intended for a Chinese-speaking North American audience and appeared in commercial and social environments only, such as the popular Chinese channel “Los Angeles Life Interaction”. It started at a relatively high level of 25,000 occurrences, rapidly moving up to 30,000 hits, but thereafter slowly sank back to lower levels, reaching 5000 hits on 16 February, after which it lingered on for a while before sinking further to much lower levels.
An example of NCP will help to clarify its usage. We give an example from 22 March 2020 which was taken from Tencent’s WeChat social media account of the Jingxi Public Security department:
(5) NCP yìqíng fāshēng yǐlái, yǐ Xí Jìnpíng tóngzhì wéi héxīn de dǎng zhōngyāng gāodù zhòngshì.
“Since the outbreak of the NCP, the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core has attached great importance to it.”
(Wēixìn gōngzhònghào Jìngxī Gōng’ān, ‘WeChat public account Jingxi Public Security’ 22 March 2020).
All timelines discussed so far are summarized in
Figure 2, where they are listed in their order of appearance.
A pattern with two peaks before gradual decline was observed for two of the coronavirus disease names. In order of appearance in our data, these were No. 13 Bùmíng yuányīn bìngdúxìng fèiyán, “Unknown viral pneumonia”, and No. 2 Xīnxíng guānzhuàng bìngdú gǎnrǎn de fèiyán, “Pneumonia caused by novel coronavirus”. The latter appeared on 10 January but reached a frequency peak at 23 January 2020, the date of the Wuhan lockdown, when its use jumped to a level of 140,000 thousand. It reached a second peak of 120,000 at 5 February, the announcement of 10,000 infections in Wuhan. Thereafter the frequency started to decline. For the two weeks of its popularity, it had an average daily use of 135,000 hits. The term was shared across all three media types. Nevertheless, like most names, it was most frequently used in commercial media. One in five of the remaining occurrences fell into each of the official and social domains.
We illustrate pneumonia name No. 2 with an example from the end of January 2020 taken from the China Youth Net site:
(6) Xīnxíng guānzhuàng bìngdú gǎnrǎn de fèiyán yǒu nǎxiē zhèngzhuàng?
“What are the symptoms of Pneumonia caused by the novel coronavirus?”
(Zhōngguó Qīngnián Wǎng; China Youth Net, 20 January 2020).
Frequencies for name No. 13 “Unknown viral pneumonia”, which appeared as early as 1 January, were much lower, not higher than 2500 daily uses. Two peaks followed each other between 4 and 13 January, shadowed by a lower peak of 2000 occurrences on 23 January, during the Wuhan lockdown announcement. It was a name formally approved by the authorities and occurring mainly in official media with a small following of 15% in social media. Commercial might not have liked the idea of “unknown”.
A fourth timeline pattern in our data is the names with a frequency peak at the end of the timeline. This pattern is illustrated by three disease names:
No. 7 Xīnguān, “Novel Coronavirus”;
No. 6 Xīndú fèiyán, “New viral pneumonia”; and
No. 14 Zhōngguó fèiyán, “China pneumonia”.
We will discuss them in this order. Name No. 7 “Novel Coronavirus” came into use around 20 January 2020 but reached its peak much later around 14 March, at a time when authorities started to relax movement in the province, another emotional event opening new ways of work, leisure, and entertainment. The occurrence peak rose sharply to over 100,000 tokens around that mid-March time and then fell back to a lower level of 60,000 with an average of 26,000 hits for the six weeks of its existence in our data. It was a popular term especially in commercial media, two-thirds of the occurrences were in that domain. The remaining one-third occurred in social media and we have no attested instances of use in the governmental domain for this more casual term.
Name No. 6 “New viral pneumonia” had some incidental occurrences since 29 January but showed a sudden peak of 150 occurrences in the week of February 20, which happened to be the date of the announcement of the lockdown extension until 10 March for all nonessential companies, including factories and schools. It is a term designed and fancied by state-controlled institutions, but had little support in commercial media and was totally neglected by social media (
Table 5).
Name No. 14
Zhōngguó fèiyán, “China pneumonia”, appeared at the end of December 2019 for the first time but became more popular during the 23 January lockdown upheaval when it reached a daily frequency of more than 500, moving in the following weeks between 200 and 600 daily hits. In March 2020, that term experienced a sudden peak. This surge was the result of a press conference on 19 March 2020 (
http://ling.cass.cn/xzfc/xzfc_xzgd/202002/t20200204_5084687.html)(accessed on 22 March 2021) by the then US President Donald Trump, who started to refer to the pandemic as the “Chinese virus”, a move that attracted media attention in various countries, including Chinese domestic media such as Tencent, («为什么新冠肺炎不能称为“中国肺炎”?» 3月22日
https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20200321A0CCYS00, accessed on 22 March 2021) Sohu, («“中国肺炎”之称用心险恶, 绝不容忍借疫情妖魔化中国!» 3月21日
https://www.sohu.com/a/381834410_730080, accessed on 22 March 2021) as well as China Finance and Economics («港科大学生会竟说出“中国肺炎”“东亚病flu”, 校长怒斥» 3月21日
http://www.cfi.net.cn/p20200321000027.html, accessed on 22 March 2021)These sources all reported on and criticized the president’s word choice. Trump’s controversial remarks led to heated discussions of “China pneumonia”, resulting in a sudden active period of this name variety.
Example (7) is an illustration of a message, in mid-March, spreading via Taiwanese media in which the erstwhile President Trump was criticized as being discriminatory as well as incompetent:
(7) Měiguó zǒngtǒng Tèlǎngpǔ chúle gěi bìngdú guànyǐ qíshìxìng de chēngwèi “zhōngguó fèiyán”, yǐjí xiànzhì Zhōng-Ou lǚkè fù Měi zhīwài, yìngduì yìqíng zhǐhuī wúfāng, yǔ fángyì zǒng zhǐhuī fù zǒngtǒng Péngsī hé jíkòng zhōngxīn zhījiān duōtóu mǎchē bù tóngdiào.
“In addition to labelling the virus ‘Chinese pneumonia’, which is discriminatory, and restricting travel to the United States by Chinese and European travelers, US President Trump has no means to respond to the epidemic. Vice-President Pence and the Center for Disease Control are not in tune!”
(Zhōngguó Táiwān wǎng, 20 March 2020, Táihǎi wǎng tóngrì zhuǎnfā; China Taiwan Net, 20 March 2020, forwarded on the same day by Taiwan Net)
The unwelcome nature of the name “China pneumonia” remained an issue also under medically informed netizens. An example from the end of March 2020 further shows the confusion that still existed, when a medical professional wondered what was wrong with a term like “Chinese pneumonia”:
(8) Wèishéme xīnguān fèiyán bùnéng chēngwéi “Zhōngguó fèiyán”?
“Why can’t the new Coronavirus pneumonia be called ‘China pneumonia’”?
(Dīng Xiāng yīshēng; Doctor Ding Xiang, 22 March 2020)
The last two Corona disease names are No. 9 Wǔfèi, “Wu(han) P(neumonia)”, and No. 1 Xīnxíng guānzhuàng bìngdú fèiyán, “Novel coronavirus pneumonia”. They have a similar timeline pattern, one quite different from the four patterns discussed so far. These patterns started low, slowly built up their frequency, reaching a peak in the middle of the observation period and then declined. Their frequencies, however, were of different magnitudes, name No. 1 reached frequencies close to 500,000, whereas name No. 9 had peaks limited to a few hundred hits. Given these frequency differences, we will start with name No. 1.
Disease name No. 1
Xīnxíng guānzhuàng bìngdú fèiyán, “Novel coronavirus pneumonia”, appeared on 9 January and remained unnoticed until the lockdown announcement on 23 January when it jumped up to 200,000 occurrences, slowly becoming more popular thereafter until it reached another high during the announcement of lockdown extensions on 13 and 14 February, reaching a high of 500,000 daily occurrences. After that peak, its use started to decline, slowly falling back to a very low level at the end of the data collection period. Its popularity was supported by all media types with dominance of commerce, followed by governmental and social media, in that order (
Table 3).
Name No. 9,
Wǔfèi’s daily frequency was relatively low, varying between 100 and 300 with usage equally shared between commercial and social media (
Table 5). Attested as early as 1 January, the name reached its first frequency peak of close to 200 hits during the lockdown announcement on 23 January and thereafter reached a succession of higher peaks at mildly higher levels of 300 and 400, the latter occurring during the lockdown extensions of 13 and 20 February referred to already.
Timelines were presented in order of appearance, see
Figure 2 and
Table 2 for overviews. Peak events were related to official announcements, the Wuhan lockdown, and related events. We presented five timeline patterns, rise and high frequency, rise-and-fall, double initial peak, end peak, and middle peak. The rise-and-fall timelines showed a peak followed by a fall. Three of these showed a slow fall, whereas the remaining three were examples of rapid rises and rapid falls, leaving a special position for NCP with a not too rapid but still clear fall. The two double peaks also occurred at the beginning of the timeline. If these double peak timelines are seen as a special case of rise-and-fall, this latter pattern is dominant with 56% of all data. The three end peaks each had their own story, with No. 11 “Viral pneumonia caused by wild animals” showing the effect of media attention and No. 14 “China pneumonia” demonstrating the impact of international influences on the frequency of use of Chinese pneumonia names.