The WHO (World Health Organization) appointed the last variant of the COVID-19 “omicron”, and declared that it became a worrying variant since it first identified in South Africa on November 9 and that it presents a global risk"Very tall" of potentially serious consequences.
Although the global health agency and other experts still study how dangerous and transmissible is the variant, it has already attracted international attention due to the “unprecedented” number of mutations that it exhibits compared to other Covid variants, as well as the confusion about the confusion aboutWhere does your name get.
Why is the variant called an omicron?
At the beginning of the pandemic, the new variants of the SARS-COV-2 virus received scientific names with a complex combination of letters and numbers.
This meant that, to abbreviate, it usually referred to the variants according to the country where they first identified, a system that, according to experts, resulted in a stigma against the people of those countries, as well as in some confusion anddisinformation.
In May 2021 the WHO announced a simple nomenclature system for the new variants of the virus.Declared that each new variant would bear the name of successive letters of the Greek alphabet.
As such, one of the first variants with significant mutations that sequenced for the first time in the United Kingdom, B.1.1.7, Alfa was called, and a threatening power variant that emerged in South Africa in 2020 was called Beta.
According to this method, WHO appointed the new B variant on Friday.1.1.529 omicron, which is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet.The omicron letter is equivalent to the brief English letter "o" and similar to the "O" of the Spanish alphabet.
In addition to an omicron, the WHO has listed five other “variants of concern”, which uses to describe whether a variant is more contagious, if vaccines work less against it or if it has a combination of both characteristics.
Alfa and Beta are still variants of concern, along with Gamma, which was first discovered in Brazil, Lambda, which was found in Peru, and Delta, which originated in India, and is the dominant worldwide.
There are other variants that did not raise concerns so immediate but that were called "variants of interest" and that are still to be evaluated.Among them are mu, zeta, eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa and Epsilon.
"No country should be stigmatized by detecting and reporting variants," said the technical director of COVID-19 of the WHO, Maria Van Kerkhove, when the Greek alphabetical system was announced.
Van Kerkhove declared in an interview at that time that if more than twenty -four significant variants are identified and WHO runs out of Greek letters, a new name system will be announced.
Why were Nu and XI omitted?
By appointing the new omicron variant, two previous letters of the Greek alphabet were omitted: Nu and XI.Many people have noticed XI is a last name generally associated with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“’ Nu ’is confused too easy with‘ New ’, and‘ Xi ’was not used because it is a common surname,” said WHO in a statement to Reuters.
"WHO best practices to appoint disease.
This was the first time that the organization skipped letters by naming crown variants and, as a result, China's political opponents took advantage of it.
In the US.UU., Republican Senator Ted Cruz wrote: "If WHO is so afraid of the Chinese Communist Party, how can you trust that you will criticize them the next time they try to cover up a catastrophic world pandemic".
The former president's son, Donald Trump JR, added: "As regards me, the original name will always be the XI variant".
And Priyanka chaturvedi, an Indian policy, also criticized the health agency.
She wrote: “WHO does not criticize China.WHO is skipped and XI as variants.But WHO apologists arrive at our Timeline to accuse Africa and India.First be brave and then we talk ".
