The World Health Organization said it has assigned new 'labels' to key coronavirus variants so the public can refer to them by letters of the Greek alphabet instead of where the variant was first detected
The World Health Organization said on Monday that it has assigned new"labels" to key coronavirus variants so the public can refer to them by letters of the Greek alphabet instead of where the variant was first detected.
For instance, WHO calls the"UK variant" "Alpha," and the"South African variant" is "Beta.""No country should be stigmatized for detecting and reporting variants," Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead for Covid-19 response, wrote in a Twitter post Monday.
There are some concerns that WHO's new Greek alphabet naming system has come a little too late -- and now the system might make describing the variants even more complicated as there will be three potential names: their scientific name, references based on where a variant was first identified and now, WHO's Greek alphabet labeling."It would have been good to have thought about this nomenclature early," Dr.
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