SARS-CoV-2 is an appropriate name for the new coronavirus

Under these rules, a newly emerged virus is normally assigned to a species based on phylogeny and taxonomy.4 Through DivErsity pArtitioning by hieRarchical Clustering-based analyses,5 the newly emerged coronavirus was deemed not sufficiently novel but is a sister virus to SARS-CoV, the primary viral isolate defining the species. For various reasons, the name of a disease and its causative viral pathogen can be different, as exemplified by acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Given that SARS-CoV-2 is already being used in the scientific literature, a name change at this stage would cause confusion in the scientific community.