What exactly does COVID-19 mean?

Bruce Aylward: Coronavirus 2019. The aim is to let people know it's a new coronavirus and to differentiate it from those that caused SARS and other diseases like MERS.

What you want with a name is to clearly differentiate it from other diseases, and to clearly associate it with a certain symptom.

And when we name diseases like this we're very careful to try to avoid creating any kind of stigma and attaching it to a place or to a country or even a person. You want to foster global understanding and cooperation.

Bruce Aylward, a Canadian epidemiologist and leader of the WHO-China Joint Mission on COVID-19, shares his insights with China Daily in Geneva on March 6.