Most of the widespread variants of the SARS-CoV-2 have been referred to with a Greek alphabet. After all, the scientific name is long and difficult to remember. However, the new variant is known as Omicron. Read to find out the reason behind its naming.
Why is the new variant called Omicron?
While the World Health Organisation (WHO) has been using Greek letters for widespread variants of the virus, it hasn’t done so in the case of the new variant. Before the emergence of the new variant from South Africa, the WHO had already used 12 Greek letters. Following Mu, the WHO chose to use Omicron instead of Nu or Xi, the letters between Mu and Omicron. The WHO rejected Nu because it can be easily confused with the word new. However, Xi was also rejected as it is a popular Chinese surname shared by many including the President, Xi Jinping.
“Two letters were skipped —Nu and Xi — because Nu is too easily confounded with ‘new’ and Xi was not used because it is a common surname. And WHO best practices for naming new diseases (developed in conjunction with FAO and OIE back in 2015) suggest avoiding ‘offending any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups,” stated the WHO.
More on the naming of variants
All variants of the coronavirus are given scientific names. They not only help in identifying viruses but also in understanding their parentage and evolution. For example, the scientific name for Omicron is B.1.1.529. This signifies that it evolved from the B.1 lineage. The variants are caused due to mutations or small errors during replication. They pass through a branch of the family tree, or lineage, creating more variants. Variants are a group of viruses that have inherited the same set of distinct mutations.
However, scientific names are not very easy to remember or use in everyday life. To make this easy, covid variants were named after the country they were first reported in. While terms like ‘UK variant’, ‘South Africa variant’ and ‘India variant’ are easy to remember, they signify connection to a country. Hence, to avoid triggering blame-game and exclusions, the WHO came up with a new system that uses Greek letters. Hence, everyone started using the term ‘Delta variant’ for the ‘Indian variant’. Similarly, the Greek letter Alpha replaced the UK.