How Omicron and other Covid-19 variants were named

A new name is being splashed across headlines worldwide this week as reported cases of the latest Covid-19 “variant of concern” continue to climb.

Omicron joins four other variants on the World Health Organization’s list of the most worrying strains of the coronavirus. Like Omicron, these variants of concern all have scientific names, but are commonly known as Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta under a naming system rolled out by the UN health agency earlier this year.

What’s in a name?

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Until May, variants of Covid-19 were commonly named after the area in which they were first identified. For example, the strain now known as Delta was initially called the Indian variant, after first being identified in the South Asian country in October 2020, while Alpha was formerly the Kent variant, after the English county where the first cases were reported.

The WHO decided to rename Covid-19 variants using letters from the Greek alphabet in order to “both simplify the public discussion and to strip some of the stigma from the emergence of new variants”, said US health site Stat.

So while the latest variant of concern is known in the scientific community as B.1.1.529, it has been assigned the alternative name of Omicron, after the 15th Greek letter, rather than being identified by its reported point of origin, in South Africa.

After interviewing Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s coronavirus lead, Stat explained that the reasoning was that “a country may be more willing to report it has found a new variant if it knows the new version of the virus will be identified as Rho or Sigma rather than with the country’s name”.

South Africa’s Foreign Ministry released a statement on Saturday that said the country’s scientists “should be applauded” for discovering the Omicron variant.

However, the ministry argued that the subsequent travel bans implemented in countries worldwide were “akin to punishing South Africa for its advanced genomic sequencing and the ability to detect new variants quicker”.

Skipping letters

Exactly why Omicron was chosen as the name for the fifth variant of concern despite coming 15th in the Greek alphabet has left some scratching their heads. There are several reasons.

Two “variants of interest” have also been assigned Greek letters, Lambda and Mu, but “we just do not really hear about them, as they are barely prevalent”, said the i news site.

Officials also skipped two letters, “Nu” and “Xi”, when naming the latest variant, in the interests of clarity.

WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic told a news conference that “Nu” had been ruled out because it sounded too similar to the word “new”. “And ‘Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name,” he said.

Some commentators have speculated that “Xi” was avoided “in deference to the Chinese president, Xi Jinping”, said The New York Times.

Jasarevic told reporters that the global health agency’s best practices for naming diseases suggest avoiding “causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups”.

Pinpointing origins

As well as risking stigma, naming viruses after countries or regions has historically been misleading, according to Dr Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Canada’s University of Saskatchewan.

Referencing the Chinese city where the first-ever case of Covid-19 was reported, Rasmussen told The New York Times that “from the very beginning of the pandemic, I remember people saying: ‘We called it the Spanish flu. Why don’t we call it the Wuhan coronavirus?’”

But “the Spanish flu did not come from Spain”, she continued. “We don’t know where it emerged from, but there’s a very good possibility it emerged from the US.”

And with continuing uncertainty about the origins of Covid-19, pointing the finger at any country or region might likewise be unfair.