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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

>...with the British strain now being the main one in Sweden

Off topic, but at this stage I find this geographical naming of strains being much more confusing than useful.

Recently greek letters were introduced to remove the geographic stigma [1] , so that would read as "the Alpha strain now being the main one in Sweden"

Besides risking moral overtones ("the British strain? Typical - when they aren't being Hollywood baddies they're busy incubating viruses") it only tagged where a strain was first isolated, not necessarily its geographic origin (not that it actually matters whether the Kent variant actually came from that Home County)

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/covid-19-variants-del...

It's quite amusing that there was such a push at the start of the pandemic to not call it Chinese Flu or Wuhan Flu, but the British, South Africa, India and Brazil strains all caught on quickly in the media.

I wonder which political variable could have left office between then and now to explain that?

The "Kent variant" (later "English", now "Alpha") was first described in Sept 2020, widely publicised as having become the dominant strain in the UK in late Nov 2020.

So a geographic label was widely used before Biden without apparently causing ructions. It was adopted because the released name for the variant, lineage B.1.1.7, was less convenient or distinctively memorable for the public. If it had been repeatedly referred to as the "Kentish virus" by senior politicians then a similarly hostile reaction might have been seen as was for "Chinese virus".

"variant" is not offensive than "virus" so possibly it was accepted.

The thing that stikes me about the naming of variants, is that to your standard person on the street, referring to the variants by the place they were first identified is going to be considerably more meaningful than calling them a greek letter, especially with the less common letters. It's also easier to mentally track the variant's progress if you know where it "originated".

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01483-0

> Coronavirus variants get Greek names — but will scientists use them? From Alpha to Omega, the labelling system aims to avoid confusion and stigmatization.

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