The flu epidemic that occurred in the United States and Europe in 1918 ended up going down in history as the spanish flu, something that the World Health Organization avoided when Covid jumped 100 years later. What was initially known as ‘coronavirus de Wuhan‘, ‘coronavirus chino‘ or directly the Chinese virus led to Covid-19, a name that ended up being shortened to simply Covid. From there, the variants arose… and the same problem was repeated.
Las mutations of the original virus they jumped out of China but by then, the WHO had already established a clear protocol for their nomenclature. From the first detected variant of the original strain, the one that was detected in British territory, the Greek letters began to be used.
The first parallel strain to the original, detected in the United Kingdom for the first time, was named variant Alfaand from there they emerged Beta (South Africa), Gamma (Brazil), Delta (India) Epsilon (California), Zeta (Brazil), And (UK and Nigeria), Theta (Filipinas), Iota (New York), Kappa (India), Lambda (Peru), In (Colombia)… and Omicron.
The latter, the prevailing one right now, has had sub-variants due to its transmissibility that have their own characteristics. the bloodline BQ.1 and its sublineages, including BQ.1.1are already the ones that are most feared today, which has been the reason for its being baptized with a proper name: “Hellhound”alluding to Cerberusthe three-headed dog that guarded Hades (hell) in Greek mythology.
From letters to constellations
The Greek alphabet has 24 letters and 21 have already been used. In addition, several have been discarded, such as Not (because it could be confused with the word ‘new’, ‘new’ in English) or Xi (a very common name in China, including the president of the country), so in the face of the eventual arrival of new variants and sub-variants, the WHO is already proposing solutions.
The first is restart the greek alphabet, but adding another word or number, such as an eventual Omicron-2. However, it is most likely that the name of constellations. Maria Van Kerkhove, technical chief of the WHO, raised it in an interview in ‘NewScientist’, but they will be used lesser known constellation namesto avoid changing your mind about “the pretty stars we see in the sky.”