How the omicron, a new variant of the Covid-19, got its name

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Markets plummeted on Friday, hopes of taming the coronavirus waned, and a new word entered the pandemic’s lexicon: “omicron.”

The Covid-19 variant that emerged in South Africa was named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.

The naming system, announced by the WHO ​(World Health Organization) in May, facilitates communication to the public about variants, making it less confusing, according to the agency and international experts.

For example, the variant that emerged in India is not popularly known as B.1.617.2. It is called “delta”, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet.

There are now seven “variants of interest” or “of concern” and each has a Greek letter, according to the WHO tracking page.

Some other Greek-letter variants do not meet these classification levels, and WHO has also skipped two letters before omicron —”nu” and “xi”—, leading to speculation as to whether “xi” was avoided in deference to Chinese president Xi Jinping.

“Nu is very easily confused with ‘new’,” spokesman Tarik Jasarevic explained Saturday. “And ‘xi’ was not used because it is a common surname.”

He added that the agency’s best practices for naming diseases suggest “not causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic group.”

Some better known variants, such as delta, have reached variants of concern. Others in this category have been called alpha, beta, and gamma. Others that emerged, which were variants of interest, were called lambda and mu. Greek letters were also used for variants that did not meet these criteria, but nu and xi were the only ones discarded.

WHO promoted this naming system as being simple and accessible, unlike the scientific variant names, which “can be difficult to pronounce and remember, and give rise to disclosure errors,” the agency said.

Some researchers agree.

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, said she conducted many interviews with reporters this year before the Greek naming system was announced, and she stumbled across confusing explanations for the B.1.1.7 and B variants. 1,351. They are known today as alpha, which originated in the UK, and beta, which appeared in South Africa.

“It’s really uncomfortable talking to a person when you have to constantly use a alphabet soup of variant designations,” she said, adding: “After all, people end up calling them ‘UK variant’ or ‘Africa variant southern'”.

That’s another important reason the WHO adopted the Greek naming system, Rasmussen said: The older naming convention was unfair to the populations where the virus arose. The agency said the practice of describing variants by the places where they were detected was “stigmatizing and discriminatory”.

The practice of naming viruses by region has also historically been misleading, said Rasmussen. Ebola, for example, takes its name from a river that is actually far from where the virus originated.

“From the beginning of the pandemic, I remember people saying, ‘We call the flu Spanish, why don’t we call this the Wuhan coronavirus?'” Rasmussen said. “The Spanish flu didn’t come from Spain. We don’t know where it came from, but there’s a good chance it was in the United States.”

WHO encouraged national authorities and media outlets to adopt the new labels. They do not replace technical names, which convey important information to scientists and will continue to be used in research.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves.

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