Everyone knows the names of the main variants of COVID Alpha, Delta and Omicron. But last year, the evolution of the virus shifted, muddying the waters as well as the names of the major variants. Instead of spawning new variants, COVID began to evolve within Omicron itself—at breakneck speed, no less. The organization responsible for naming the latest variants of concern – the World Health Organization – stopped using Greek letters after Omicron, arguing that any new variants were not different enough to warrant nicknames.
Remember the previously ubiquitous strains of COVID BA.4, BA.5 or BQ.1.1? Have you heard of the currently growing XBB.1.5 and do you understand what the jumble of letters and numbers means? You probably don’t—and some experts say it’s because of the names. You could be forgiven for thinking that another strain of Omicron poses no new threat – especially if you already had Omicron or received the new Omicron booster.
New strains of Omicron are becoming increasingly portable and evasive, with the ability to evade immunity from previous vaccination and infection. Using the term “Omicron” or something similar to XBB.1.5 to describe them just isn’t a deal breaker anymore, Dr. Ryan Gregory, a biology professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, told Fortune.
The “Kraken” is what he calls the XBB.1.5, which the WHO has just announced as Omicron’s most portable variant yet. For months, Gregory has been working to come up with “street names” for complex strains of COVID in an effort to better communicate the evolving Omicron threat to the public.
And as far as nicknames go, he has a lot more where the kraken comes from.
With input from both professional and “citizen” scientists around the world, Gregory compiled a list of memorable nicknames from Greek mythology and other realms—Chiron, Argus, Basilisk, and Typhon—for Omicron’s spawn, which medical experts say represents the most -the big threat in the near future. He told Fortune that he was inspired by a Twitter user who called the Omicron BA.2.75 strain “Centaurus” this summer, and saw how the media and some pundits picked up on it.
Since Gregory began using the Kraken — an aggressive sea monster from Norse folklore — shortly after Christmas, it has quickly gained momentum, Bloomberg reports. The term has been adopted by numerous other international and national news outlets, including Insider and Sky News. Centaurus has been mentioned in magazine articles and used by the likes of Nature and the Guardian. And some tracking options already use suggested names as Twitter hashtags.
Gregory likened Omicron and its variants to various species of the vertebrate mammal family.
“If you said, ‘Oh, what’s that thing in my yard?’ and I said, ‘It’s a mammal,’ you’d say, ‘Something that’s going to eat me?’ Is it going to steal my vegetables? Does it carry disease? Is it someone’s pet?” he explained.
“Omicron” remains a useful descriptor, he maintains. But more than a year after the highly transmissible Omicron strain appeared on the world stage, someone needs to name new worrisome variants.
If the WHO didn’t, he decided he would.
Are the days of Greek letters over?
As the variants of COVID began to materialize, the WHO came up with the strategy of naming them with Greek letters, skipping some that might be confusing — like Nu, which sounds like “new,” which would apply to all variants at some point — or offensive to some, like Xi, the first name of China’s president.
Overall, the approach works, Gregory said. But Omicron messed things up.
Dr. Raj Rajnarayanan, assistant dean for research and associate professor at NYIT’s Jonesboro, Arkansas campus, is on Gregory’s unofficial team to develop nicknames for particularly troublesome offshoots of Omicron.
Even as an experienced scientist and professor, Rajnarayanan said he finds it difficult to communicate effectively with non-scientists about the tangled mess of variants that scientists observe.
“When you keep calling 200 different lines with different potential by the same name, it becomes a problem,” he recently told Fortune.
Experts like Gregory and Rajnarayanan worry that the lack of new and specific names for the Omicron variants could lead members of the public to draw false conclusions — such as that the virus is not evolving or that exposure to Omicron months ago will provide protection against -new strains of Omicron, which is not necessarily true.
“The public cannot keep these numbers accurate”
So far, the WHO has refused to give a Greek letter to Omicron’s particularly worrisome variants. Fortune reached out to the international health organization to ask why and did not receive a response.
Its persistence is based on science, as new variants of Omicron can be traced back to older variants of Omicron. But that’s not practical, Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research and founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Fortune last fall.
“And it’s not a good defense not to name them,” he added. “I would ask them to do it. The public cannot keep these numbers straight.
Topol says he would call the until recently world-dominant BA.5 Pi or Sigma because it is “so different” from the original Omicron, the BA.1, as well as the so-called stealth Omicron, or BA.2.
Two particularly worrisome recent variants — BQ.1.1 and XBB — should also be labeled with Greek letters because the researchers called them “extreme in terms of immunogenicity and resistance to monoclonal antibodies,” he said at the time.
“They can be given names with new Greek letters instead of the ones some people come up with,” he said of the new varieties. “If different people are going to come up with names, it will be just as confusing as numbers or letters.”
Basilisk here, Hydra there
When describing potentially threatening variants, the WHO currently uses so-called Pango lines – combinations of letters and numbers you’ve probably heard of, such as BA.2.75.2 and BA.4.6.
The Pango tags have retained their specificity because the virus mutates indefinitely, Gregory said. But such labels are too precise for the general public. And besides being forgotten, they are easily confused.
“When I talk to people, I say BA.1, they think I’m saying BL.1 – and it’s a different variant,” Rajnarayanan said. “Even the two-letter system causes confusion.”
Gregory equates Pango names to technical species names, such as Mus musculus for mouse or Rattus norvegicus for rat. Such technical names are not often used by the general public. However, some animal species — like Oncorhynchus mykiss or rainbow trout — get a common name because “we see them often, they’re important to us, they’re dangerous or useful or tasty or whatever,” he said.
And so it should be with the variants of COVID, he argued. Especially common, “high-flying” variants like the XBB, a mix of the BJ.1 and BM.1.1.1, should be given a nickname — Gryphon, according to his system — to more easily communicate the threat to the general public.
This is especially important, he says, as the menagerie of Omicron spawn is growing in different places around the world in a way not seen before in a pandemic.
“If we want to make it clear that what’s going up in the UK is not the same as what’s going up in the US – the ‘alphabet soup’ is going to be very difficult for that,” he said. He is confident that if his system is adopted, with, say, Basilisk and Cerberus in the UK and Hydra and Eterna in the US, “you can immediately recognize which names are the same and which are not”.
If COVID keeps spawning new mutations, there are other lists of names to use — planets, stars, constellations, galaxies, Gregory said.
What the hell is he going to think next?
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