Covid wasn't around until 2019, so I don't imagine what you'd expect to find earlier than that? It's funny how it mis-dates a lot of the entires as being from decades earlier though.
It's exactly why it's a perfect test search to see which sites have inaccurate dates.
My personal theory is that blogs and companies set older dates on purpose to appear as a more legitimate source. But I have absolutely no evidence to back that up. I'd like to make results more accurate by adding other sources eventually as part of another one of my same day projects.
Pretty sure Reddit does that for SEO purposes. 5 year old threads (with no recent comments) have started showing up on the google serp even when I’m using a date filter to exclude everything >1 month old. The filter works for most sites, but a few consistently get through.
Off-topic, but I always assumed there was some consistent disease naming convention in use here and that there must have been earlier instances of "COVID-YY", given that this isn't the first coronavirus disease that has been observed, but I couldn't find any examples of another one.
This is from an article [1] on Coronaviruses from the NIH website:
>SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), which emerged in November 2002 and causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS); MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which emerged in 2012 and causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS); and SARS-CoV-2, which emerged in 2019 and causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
So SARS-CoV causes SARS, MERS_CoV causes MERS, SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19. I guess they didn't want to call it SARS-2? Who is "they" - who coined the term COVID-19?
Wikipedia [2] explains:
>During the initial outbreak in Wuhan, the virus and disease were commonly referred to as "coronavirus" and "Wuhan coronavirus", with the disease sometimes called "Wuhan pneumonia". In the past, many diseases have been named after geographical locations, such as the Spanish flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome, and Zika virus. In January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended 2019-nCoV and 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease as interim names for the virus and disease per 2015 guidance and international guidelines against using geographical locations or groups of people in disease and virus names to prevent social stigma. The official names COVID‑19 and SARS-CoV-2 were issued by the WHO on 11 February 2020. The Director-General, Tedros Adhanom explained that CO stands for corona, VI for virus, D for disease, and 19 for 2019, the year in which the outbreak was first identified. The WHO additionally uses "the COVID‑19 virus" and "the virus responsible for COVID‑19" in public communications.
So I guess it really is the first official "COVID-YY", although we have had diseases in the past that might have been given similar names (SARS -> COVID-02, MERS -> COVID->12) had the current naming guidelines been in place.
>Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).
>WHO developed the best practices for naming new human infectious diseases in close collaboration with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and in consultation with experts leading the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).
Covid wasn't around until 2019, so I don't imagine what you'd expect to find earlier than that? It's funny how it mis-dates a lot of the entires as being from decades earlier though.