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These days, it’s an actual headache to maintain tabs on the coronavirus’s ever-shifting subvariants. BA.2, BA.4, and BA.5, three Omicron permutations that rose to prominence final 12 months, have been complicated sufficient. Now, along with these, we have now to cope with BQ.1.1, BF.7, B.5.2.6, and XBB.1.5, the model of Omicron at present that includes in involved headlines. Recently, issues have additionally gotten significantly stranger. Alongside the strings of letters and numbers, a number of nicknames for these subvariants have began to achieve traction on-line. Where as soon as we had Alpha and Delta and Omicron, we now have Basilisk, Minotaur, and Hippogryph. Some individuals have been referring to XBB.1.5 merely as “the Kraken.” An inventory compiled on Twitter reads much less like a listing of variants than just like the listing of a mythological zoo.
The nicknames should not official. They have been coined not by the World Health Organization however by an off-the-cuff group of scientists on Twitter who imagine Omicron’s many rotating varieties deserve extra widespread dialog. The names have, to an extent, caught on: Kraken has already made its manner from Twitter to a lot of main information websites, together with Bloomberg and The New York Times. Unofficial epithets have come and gone all through the pandemic—keep in mind “stealth Omicron” and the “Frankenstein variant”?—however these new ones are on one other stage of weirdness. And not everybody’s a fan.
The names related to the coronavirus have been a fraught dialog for the reason that pandemic’s earliest days, as scientists and public-health figures have tried to make use of phrases which might be understandable and maintain individuals’s consideration however that additionally keep away from pitfalls of inaccuracy, fear-mongering, or xenophobia and racism (see: Donald Trump referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus” and “kung flu”). The official names for variants and subvariants—names comparable to SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7—come from the Pango naming system, which was original by evolutionary biologists within the early months of the pandemic to standardize variant-naming practices. As baffling as they will appear, they comply with a transparent logic: Under the system, B refers to a selected COVID lineage, B.1 refers back to the sublineage of B lineage, B.1.1 refers back to the first sublineage of the B.1 sublineage, and so forth. When the names get too lengthy, a letter replaces a string of numbers—B.1.1.529.1, for instance, turns into BA.1.
These official names don’t precisely roll off the tongue or stick within the reminiscence, which turned an issue when new variants of concern began to come up and the world started groping for tactics to speak about them. In May 2021, the WHO instituted its now-familiar Greek-letter naming system to stamp out the geographic associations that have been gaining prominence on the time. B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and B.1.617—which have been being referred to respectively because the U.Ok. variant, the South African variant, and the Indian variant—turned Alpha, Beta, and Delta. But then, alas, got here Omicron. Rather than giving strategy to yet one more new Greek-letter variant, Omicron has spent greater than a 12 months branching into sublineages, and sublineages of sublineages. As a consequence, the nomenclature has devolved again into alphanumeric incomprehensibility. Seven totally different Omicron sublineages now account for at the very least 2 % of all infections, and none accounts for greater than about 40 % (although XBB.1.5 is threatening to overwhelm its opponents).
It’s nice information that the methods by which the coronavirus has been mutating not too long ago haven’t been vital sufficient to provide a complete new, widespread, and probably much more worrisome model of itself that the world has to cope with. But it additionally makes speaking in regards to the virus far more annoying. Enter T. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary biologist at Canada’s University of Guelph who is without doubt one of the leaders of a small, casual group of scientists which have taken it upon themselves to call the various subvariants that the WHO doesn’t deem worthy of a brand new Greek letter. The names—Hydra, Cerberus, Centaurus—originated on Twitter, the place Gregory compiled them right into a record.
Their worth, Gregory instructed me, is that they fill the area in between the Greek and Pango techniques, permitting individuals to debate the various present Omicron variants that don’t justify a brand new Greek letter however are nonetheless, maybe, of curiosity. You can consider it in the identical manner we do animal taxonomy, he mentioned. Calling a variant Omicron, like calling an animal a mammal, is just not significantly descriptive. Calling a variant by its Pango title, like calling an animal by its Latinate species designation, is very descriptive however a bit unwieldy in widespread parlance. When we converse of cattle that moo and produce milk, we converse not of mammals or of Bos taurus however of cows. And so BA.2.3.20 turned Basilisk.
To resolve whether or not a brand new lineage deserves its personal title, Gregory instructed me, he and his colleagues take into account each evolutionary components (how totally different is that this lineage from its predecessors, and the way regarding are its mutations?) and epidemiological components (how a lot havoc is that this lineage wreaking within the inhabitants?). They’re making an attempt to make the method extra formal, however Gregory would like that the WHO take over and standardize the method.
That, nonetheless, is unlikely to occur. When I requested about this, Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesperson, instructed me that the group is conscious of the unofficial names however that, for the second, they’re not mandatory. “Virologists and other scientists are monitoring these variants, but the public doesn’t need to distinguish between these Omicron subvariants in order to better understand their risk or the measures they need to take to protect themselves,” he mentioned. The WHO’s place, in different phrases, is that the variations between one Omicron subvariant and one other merely haven’t mattered a lot in any sensible sense, as a result of they shouldn’t have any impact on our conduct. No matter the sublineage, vaccines and boosters nonetheless provide the very best safety out there. Masks nonetheless work. Guidance on testing and isolation, too, is identical throughout the board. “If there is a new variant that requires public communication and discourse,” Jasarevic instructed me, “it would be designated a new variant of concern and assigned a new label.”
The WHO isn’t alone in objecting. For Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist on the University of Utah, the brand new names should not simply pointless however doubtlessly dangerous. “It’s absolutely crazy that we’re having random people on Twitter name variants,” he instructed me. For Goldstein, dressing up every new subvariant with an ominous monster title overplays the variations between the mutations and feeds into the panic that comes each time the coronavirus shifts kind. In this view, distinguishing one Omicron sublineage from one other is much less like distinguishing a wolf from a cow and extra like distinguishing a white-footed mouse from a deer mouse: vital to a rodentologist however not likely to anybody else. To go so far as naming lineages after terrifying legendary beasts, he mentioned, “seems obviously intended to scare the shit out of people … It’s hard to understand what broader goal there is here other than this very self-serving clout chasing.”
Gregory instructed me that concern and a spotlight should not his group’s purpose. He additionally mentioned, although, that his group is pondering of switching from mythological creatures to one thing extra impartial, comparable to constellations, partially to handle issues of whipping up pointless panic. When it involves XBB.1.5, a few of that panic definitely already exists, whipped up by less-than-nuanced headlines and Twitter personalities who feast on moments like these. Whether or not the title Kraken has contributed, the concern is that XBB.1.5 may be a variant so immune-evasive that it infects everybody once more or so virulent that it amps up the chance of any given an infection. So far, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
As my colleague Katherine Wu reported in November, we’re probably (although on no account positively) caught for the foreseeable future on this Omicron purgatory, with its extra gradual, extra piecemeal sample of viral evolution. This is definitely preferable to the sudden and surprising emergence of a harmful, drastically totally different variant. But it does imply that we’re probably going to be arguing about whether or not and the way and with what names to debate Omicron subvariants for a while to return.
Whichever facet you come down on, the state of variant-naming fairly properly encapsulates the state of the pandemic as a complete. Hardly something in regards to the pandemic has been a matter of common settlement, however the current nomenclatural free-for-all appears to have taken us someplace much more splintered, much more anarchic. We’re not simply arguing in regards to the pandemic; we’re arguing about how one can argue in regards to the pandemic. And there’s no finish in sight.