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Well, there are no “variants of COVID-19.” And this is the reason why we use greek letters.
Let me explain… when the virus first swept the globe, everyone became an instant, overnight, virologist and epidemiologist. Everyone knew. Many knew better. And most knew better than the people who have spent years or decades on this. A whole swath of my circle of friends turned from college-dropout coder at a pivoting startup into a massive virology and epidemiology pundit, reloading the JHU tracker every few minutes and writing pithy analyses of the next required steps.
Meanwhile, scientists attempted to solve a number of riddles. Some were hard to crack, and others were, by public pressure that was whipped into a frothing frenzy by said overnight virologists and epidemiologists, taboo to look at. But, still, most soldiered on. Some became politicians and social commentators more than scientists, but many just whacked away on the core of the pandemic, sequenced the virus’ genome, ran experiments in dishes, ran cohort and prospective studies… the things you do when you have to say “I don’t know” and don’t like saying it.
At the same time those lab rats of scientists worked 24 hour shifts in bunkers underground, the social pundit and communicator scientists had to find a way to communicate to the masses. And who sticks out in the masses the most? Exactly: our newly minted experts on social media. Their thinking permeates traditional media, late night pundits, and even political communicators. And with that, those new epidemiologists and virologists openly competed with the communicator scientists.
So you have two options: either you scream louder, but no one screams louder than a TikTok OnlyFans Model on Twitter, or you become like them… and the communicators did the latter, because selling pictures of their butthole on OnlyFans until they had a mob large enough to influence common perception took too long and wasn’t what they were good at.
And with that, some very basic, fundamental, things were rinsed until they washed out into each other.
Like, for example, COVID-19 (getting back to that). Scientifically, there’s SARS-CoV-2. That’s a virus. It has variants, mutations from gain-of-opportunity strains. And then there’s COVID-19. That’s a disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. There are sixteen major and 298 minor variants in the presentation of COVID-19, for example you could have severe respiratory distress with or without cytokine storms.
But, at some point, the communicator scientists gave up. The overnight experts had been getting this wrong for months, calling the virus COVID-19 and talking about “preventing the spread of COVID-19.” One of the greatest failures in this system is the bounce between “masks reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by 60%” to “masks prevent COVID-19” and the following hanging-on to one study (we call this “Breakfast Buffet Science” where you only grab the pieces you like and disregard the rest) that seemed to show, that masks reduced the chance of developing COVID-19 in infected persons. No matter that this “study” was and is a preprint and that others showed differently, the convolution of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 led to so much confusion that one as well might give up.
Now comes the “Indian” Variant. While no one complained during the “Brazilian” or “UK” variants, the Indian one was the one that brought all the right complaints to the forefront: such names rarely actually pinpoint the origin, such names are racist and support racial stereotyping, and such names cause labeling.
During my time in viral research, I sequenced one strain of the A/Wuhan/359/95(H3N2) virus, an Influenza A strain. Notice the word “Wuhan” in there? Because I was working on antibiotic resistance, I also looked at a strain of A/Texas/12/2007 (notice the “Texas”) with a decreased sensitivity to oseltamivir. To everyone in this lab it was clear, that “Wuhan” and “Texas” didn’t mean the strain had happened first there. It meant that it was first sequenced there. Which is important data to have, since antibiotic resistances are important to understand in a global and local scale. And, because everyone in the lab had a PhD or Masters degree in this field, no one confused the “Wuhan” to mean anything else.
But in the case of SARS-CoV-2 we weren’t communicating amongst ourselves. We were talking to the science communicators who then talked to the new virologists and those told the world. And out there, now named strains having been declared taboo, the science community needed something those new virologists wouldn’t fuck up as badly as the difference between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
So the numeric system we’d been using, would have been very confusing to the new virologists. We also had the Clade system, implemented in NextClade and NextAlign, which took many pointers and hints from Clustal, with which I “grew up” and improved on it. To name mutations, create phylogenic trees, and more, there’s nothing better than can be rolled out fast and afforded even by small research teams.
But that was all too complicated. In Clades, you have the year and a running letter. So you have 19A mutating into 19B and 20A, which became 20B and 20C which became 20H… you get the idea.
But even that was too complicated. We needed something even easier, so the new virologists could keep up. And thus, the V-System was born. V1, V2… and so on. Problem was, some coder-gone-virologist might think that V11 was more powerful than V10, because versioning. And that’s also BS. So, after the V-System was trialed for less than six weeks, the greek lettering system was decided. And that’s why we now have 20I as Alpha, 20H as Beta, 20J as Gamma, and so on.
Problem solved. No one will look at India or Wuhan or Kent anymore and think that a global virus must have come from there, or become racist against people from Kent or Malmø. And everyone will understand that there’s a Delta and then someone (a “new virologist” in fact) will invent the “Delta Plus” variant, which the newspapers pick up and call the Eta variant… no more confusion.