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On February 11, a World Health Organization (WHO) news conference was held in Geneva on the outbreak of the new coronavirus. It began at 6 p.m. Moscow time, and about five minutes later, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus first announced the official name of the new virus. It is called Covid-19: CO for corona, VI for virus, D for disease and 19 for 2019, the year in which it was discovered.</p>
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At 6:09 p.m. (hereinafter Moscow time), the WHO tweeted the name Covid-19 on its official Twitter account. And just a minute after that, at 6:10 p.m., an anonymous domain investor registered the Covid19.com domain name. Three minutes later, at 6:13 p.m., another domainer registered the name Covid-19.com. It matches the virus name exactly; however, domain names using a hyphen usually do not do well. It is probably for this reason that the hyphenated version was not registered first, Domain Incite says, reporting this news.</p>
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In any case, the speed of the domainers is admirable. They even managed to beat journalists: the first news mentioning Covid-19 was published by the leading news agencies Reuters and AFP about 30 minutes later.</p>
