Omicron

As I write this there's news breaking about a new variant of concern of the COVID virus, now named as Omicron.

The Greek Alphabet, by Ben Crowder

The naming of variants of concern follows the Greek alphabet letters, the last one of which was Mu (μ). (The electronics geek in me was always amused by people pronouncing the popular BitTorrent client μTorrent as “You Torrent” when in fact it was meant as “micro” - μ being the prefix for micro in electronics and other fields - as in μF for Microfarads, a measure of capacitance.)

Following on from Mu are the letters Nu and Xi, which have been skipped. Nu would have caused confusion - is it the “new” variant or the “Nu” variant? And Xi was skipped as it has associations with the president of China's name, and would further stigmatise that region of the world.

So, Omicron it is. I would observe that we're running out of Greek letters! Next up would be Pi, and that's got lots of potential for confusion!

At this stage there's little known about the variant, though the world's scientists are scrambling to understand it. The variant was identified in South Africa as others previously have been. There's a reason for this. Africa is central to research on communicable diseases and they have amazing research infrastructure. The other reason is the shockingly low rates of vaccination on the African continent due to economic hardship and probably a host of other reasons.

The big points of research will be how transmissible the new variant is (though from initial reporting, it seems that it's more transmissible than Delta), how effective our current vaccines are against it, and whether the mutations confer differences in severity of disease, mortality, and long-term outcomes.

Government reactions seem to be intent on shutting down travel from a number of nations on the African continent in an attempt to shut down transmission, but it seems unlikely that that measure will be effective. The variant has already been detected outside of Africa.

There's little we can do right now except encourage people to get vaccinated and follow protocols for reducing transmission.