WHO assigns new ‘labels’ to Covid variants to avoid the stigma

New “labels” to key coronavirus variants have been assigned by the World Health Organisation (WHO) so that the public can refer to them by letters of the Greek alphabet instead of where the variant was first detected.

For example, WHO calls the “UK variant” (B.1.1.7) “Alpha,” and the “South African variant” (B.1.351) is “Beta.”

WHO’s the technical lead for COVID-19, Maria Van Kerkhove wrote in a Twitter post, “No country should be stigmatized for detecting and reporting variants.”

A WHO expert panel also recommended using Greek alphabet letters to refer to variants, “which will be easier and more practical to discussed by non-scientific audiences,” WHO says on a new webpage on its website.

In January, the P.1 variant, first discovered in Brazil and assigned a variant of concern, has been labeled “Gamma.”

The first found variant in India, the B.1.617.2 variant, was recently reclassified from a variant of interest to variant of concern, is “Delta.” Variants of interest have been given labels from “Epsilon” to “Kappa.”

Likewise, all viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, can mutate or change over time.

In an announcement, WHO noted that the new labels do not replace existing scientific names for coronavirus variants. But the scientific names will “continue to be used in research,” Dr. Van Kerkhove said in a tweet.

According to WHO’s announcement, “While they have their advantages, these scientific names can be difficult to say and recall and are prone to misreporting. As a result, people often resort to calling variants by the places where they are detected, which is stigmatizing and discriminatory.”

This may be wrong as mutations that mark at least some variants have emerged independently in many places.

“To avoid this and to simplify public communications, WHO encourages national authorities, media outlets, and others to adopt these new labels,” WHO said.

There are some concerns that the World Health Organization’s new Greek alphabet naming system is a little late – and that there are now three possible names that will further complicate system variants: references based on their scientific name and where a variant first appeared have been identified by the WHO’s Greek alphabet labeling.