Given the fact that multiple variants may appear in a single country, referring to a variant by nation where it was first detected is imprecise and can be confusing. In India, for instance, there are currently there have been one “variant of concern” ( B.1.617.2) and two “variants of interest” ( B.1.617.1, B.1.617.3). The United Kingdom has six variants of concern or under surveillance, and the United States has four variants of interest or under surveillance, and yet no one is referring to a “US variant”.
Frankly, I don’t see the need to specifically name variants in a fashion that the general public can follow as it doesn’t really convey information that people who are not virologists or epidemiologists can usefully interpret, anyway. I’ve talked with people who have freaked out over news reports of this “strain” or that “mutant” suddenly appearing and spreading even though even a cursory analysis of data indicates that it isn’t any more virulent than existing strains and is eventually overtaken by an imported variant, e.g. the ‘UK variants’. The one bit of useful information regarding geography would be in how to impose travel restrictions to prevent contagion, although almost nobody is doing that in a sufficiently comprehensive fashion to manage except nations like Taiwan or New Zealand which are essentially closing off all non-essential travel and imposing strict quarantine on people entering the country.
I’ve been interested to read that this or that vaccine does or doesn’t work against this or that variant. So far, that news has been moderately optimistic for the US, with a lot of evidence that two doses of the mRNA vaccines remain moderately effective against most of the variants of concern.
Sure, and that is theoretically useful information; however, the reality is that an evasive and highly transmissible variant will spread far beyond the geographical location where it was first identified (and probably didn’t originate there anyway), and anyone who is really interested in following such developments won’t really have any problem following the conventional phylogenic lineage taxonomy and/or the amino acid modification or deletion, either of which are really more useful anyway. Aside from how unnecessarily politicized the whole issue of viral nomenclature has become, it just leads to ambiguity and miscommunication.
As for the effectiveness of the vaccines (mRNA and otherwise) it isn’t really something that can be predicted de novo, and it is really going to take controlled study or massive data collection to identify a variant which can escape the immunogenicity provided by the existing vaccines before it becomes widespread. We can assume that this will very likely occur because SARS-CoV-2 seems quite capable of both homologous recombination and reassortment to a degree not previously suspected (not quite at the rate of Influenza A but every time I look it seems to do things virologists didn’t think a coronavirus would do). Although immunogenecity from the vaccine seems to be quite robust, I think we can expect to need annual booster shots both to reinforce immune response against more aggressive variants and to protect against actual new strains that may develop.
I assume they are merely copying the WHO letters. If you go to this page https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants/
you will notice a “WHO label” column. But I just clicked on the CDC and ECDC pages and there were still no Greek letters there.
Just don’t mix up “Epsilon” and “Eta”, or “Mu” and “Nu” !
I do the same thing, and I respect the hell out of Stranger, but saying
is crazy-town. A lot of people are interested in following this stuff, are not experts in virology or any related field, and requiring them to use the ‘phylogenic lineage taxonomy’ is just acting to significantly increase their cognitive load to understand the world is the opposite of what we should be doing. I suspect it’s inadvertent, but it’s erecting fences around knowledge that a lot of people are interested in.
The Greek alphabet, unlike the strings of letters and numbers that make up the official names, are old friends. I don’t anticipate any troubles keeping Mu and Nu straight.
Not really, this is like the right now using “The big lie” line to mean the opposite of what it meant regarding Trump. Many in the right wing media are twisting it to declare that “the big lie” is that Biden didn’t win fair and square. When the original meaning was that yep, Trump is using a big lie tactic when declaring that he won.
Indeed, the reason the right does it is to quiet down any opposition from progressives to keep any policy that the right wing likes in place. (With the “woke” word there is no need for the misguided guy using it as a slur to be a racist, not all the ones trying to control the narrative are racist even, and yet they end up defending the ones that would love to keep racist policies in place.)
In reality, that switcheroo of the original meaning of words and phrases is the lazy thing to do. Unfortunately, it is effective with many of the conservatives nowadays.
I think the difference is purely practical.
I mean, new variants are springing up quite frequently at this point*, and even if the scientific community was focused on giving them each punchy titles it would be hard to make them stick.
Now, if at a future time, one of the variants dominates, and becomes endemic, there may well be a push to rename it to something more neutral. And the fact that most people have been largely happy to shift from “coronavirus” to “covid” shows it is possible to get the public to shift terms (or at least be aware of what the most accurate term is).
* For a long time it was stated that covid-19 was a pretty slowly mutating virus. I wonder if that has changed, or if it’s just the fact that with a huge chunk of the world’s population infected that even a slow mutation rate was bound to result in many variants.
On the WHO site in February 2020 was posted an estimate that “The mutation rate of 1.12 × 10−3 [nucleotide] mutations per site-year is similar to 0.80 × 10−3 to 2.38 × 10−3 mutations per site-year reported for SARS-CoV-1”, ie the “same order of magnitude as other RNA viruses”, but a more recent paper claims that “Whereas the SARS-CoV-2 genome is more stable than SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV, it has a relatively high dynamic mutation rate comparable to other RNA viruses”
