Most of the world calls this year's deadly respiratory disease outbreak COVID-19 and attributes it to a novel coronavirus. When U.S. President Donald Trump described the virus last month as "Chinese" because of its origin, China fumed and Trump eventually dropped it.

All along, Taiwanese officials, media and the public have been using the term "Wuhan pneumonia" in Mandarin Chinese, a reference to the central Chinese city where the disease was first reported in December. Local media sometimes call it "China Wuhan pneumonia."

The label will eventually create a new fissure in already strained relations between Taiwan and China, analysts say. "Relations between the two sides have become even worse since COVID-19," said Chao Chien-min, dean of social sciences at Chinese Culture University in Taipei. "If you keep using a location-based name, it's unfriendly toward others."

Taiwanese came up with the term "Wuhan pneumonia" because they were talking about it in December and needed a descriptor before the World Health Organization gave it an official name in mid-February.

But Taiwan and China are at odds politically. Use of the earlier term instead of the formal WHO one pivots Taiwanese people's attention back to where COVID-19 was discovered and stands to sour their impression of China. Trump dropped the "Chinese virus" in late March and said it was important to avoid blaming Asian Americans for the outbreak.

In Taiwan, the government's Central Epidemic Command Center uses the term "Wuhan pneumonia" on its daily news releases in parentheses after the English word COVID-19 and the foreign ministry uses the term "Wuhan pneumonia" only in some of its statements.

Taiwan's government-funded Central News Agency calls the disease "Wuhan pneumonia" in its many news flashes every day about the disease outbreak in other parts of the world. On the streets, people speak of the disease almost always as "Wuhan pneumonia."