In order to avoid naming and calling coronavirus variants based on the regions they were discovered in, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced a new naming system for such variants. The global agency said that it would refer to COVID-19 variants, otherwise known as “variants of concern”, using Greek alphabets.
This basically means that the first variant of concern, i.e. the mutated variant discovered in the UK (B.1.1.7) will be known as the “Alpha” variant.
Meanwhile, the second variant discovered in South Africa (B.1.351) will be deemed as the “Beta” variant instead, while the third variant of concern first discovered in Brazil will be the “Gamma” variant.
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Lastly, the variant that emerged in India will be deemed the “Delta” variant. The WHO said that future variants of concern will be labelled under a Greek alphabet that comes next in the sequence.
The WHO said that a group of experts came up with the idea to use this new naming system. These names will serve as an alternative to the scientific names, and will be “simple, easy to say and remember labels,” the agency said.
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