The Covid variants could take the names of the star constellations according to the WHO – The HuffPost

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COVID – Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and more recently Mu, the letters of the Greek alphabet become smaller as the Covid-19 mute. To ward off this potential, but almost certain, shortage, a senior World Health Organization official suggested an alternative: using the names of the constellations. stars.

In an interview posted last month by The Telegraph, Maria Van Kerkhove, technical manager at the WHO for the fight against Covid-19, announced that she was already looking for new names for virus. Indeed, facing the dynamic mutagenic Sars-Cov2, the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet seem to be quite limited.

“We might run out of Greek letters, but we’re already looking at the next set of names,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, “we’re actually looking at constellations of stars.” The next variants could thus take the name of “Aries”, “Gemini” or “Orion”.

Other alternatives were also on the table, such as the use of the names of the Greek gods and goddesses, ultimately ousted in part due to pronunciation problems.

The mutations virals are common, and Sars-Cov2 continues to evolve. While it is possible that there are more key strains than letters available, the combination of mutations that will allow a variant to prevail is very difficult to predict.

„They will be less common stars / constellations, easy to pronounce“, @mvankerkhove wrote to me. „We are just checking internally with our regional colleagues to ensure none of them cause any offense or are common names in local languages.“

– Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape) September 1, 2021

B.1.1.7, B.1.351, B.1.617.2 … In view of these scientific names, respectively, Alpha, Beta and Delta variants, we better understand the usefulness of the use of uninhibited names.

National appellations abandoned in May

Since the end of May, the “Indian variant” or “English variant” type formulas have been abandoned because deemed “stigmatizing and discriminatory” by the WHO. The Greek letters were therefore a backup solution, but already 12 mutations have been named by these characters, that is to say half of the alphabet.

If Delta and Beta are part of the four “worrying variants”, or Eta and Lambda “variants of interest”, others very quickly fell by the wayside. Thus Epsilon plus, Zeta and Theta, previously considered “of interest” have since been downgraded.

No decision has yet been made regarding the further naming of the next variants. What is certain is that the next choice – which could be announced “relatively quickly” – will not affect the scientific names of the Sars-Cov-2 variants. For now, the virus evolution working group and WHO legal team are making sure the proposals “don’t bother anyone with these names”.

See also on The HuffPost: Why are some variants necessary and others not?