It took the World Health Organisation (WHO) more than a year to decide on a naming system for coronavirus variants.
As a grammatical act of kindness, choosing letters of the Greek alphabet made life easier for everyone who needed to describe a mutation without having to remember long strings of letters and numbers.
This system was adopted in June and now we have Alpha, Beta, Gamma and other “variants of interest” (VOI) as well as the deadlier Delta and other “variants of concern” (VOC).
Incidentally, in the selective-history books of my antediluvian schooldays, VOC stood for Dutch East India Company. It is perhaps appropriate that the abbreviation for a colonial pillager should now be claimed by a killer bug that is also in the business of global destruction.
On Friday, the WHO proclaimed that the new wildfire B.1.1.529 strain of Covid-19 is most definitely a VOC and that its name should be omicron.
Omicron, which translates into English as “little o” (micro o), is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, written as a lower-case o and used for pronouncing short o-sounds (as in “of” and “mom”). The WHO spells it Omicron but pedantically speaking it should really be omicron.
The arched symbol added later by the Greeks to represent long o-sounds (“oh!”) was called Omega, which means “big O” (mega O).
The coronavirus naming convention follows the letters of the Greek alphabet in order. The WHO’s advisory committee has already used 12 of the 24 letters to label different strains, but this week it skipped over the letters known as Nu and Mu and settled instead on omicron.
I suppose they could hardly call the latest manifestation Nu, since its forebears have been waging war on the world for nearly two years. Also, what happens when the next one comes along and Nu becomes Old?
It is less clear why Mu was rejected. Perhaps because of its association with cows.
The word “vaccine” means “pertaining to cows”. It began to apply to life-saving drugs when Edward Jenner discovered a cure for smallpox made from cowpox bacillus. Smallpox remains the only human disease that has successfully been eradicated by medical science, but it took a while to convince the anti-vaxxers of the 1800s that they were not going to grow horns or become strangely attracted to bulls.
Come to think of it, this taint of ancient idiocy might be exactly why the WHO decided to pass over Mu in favour of omicron.
Omicron, “little o”, does however seem to be a somewhat feeble and insignificant name for what could turn out to be the most dangerous and destructive coronavirus variant yet.
Mind you, its big brother Omega, “long O”, would not do either.
As the concluding letter of the Greek alphabet, Omega has become a synonym for “last and final”, partly because the phrase “the Alpha and Omega” was retained in Greek form in the English translation of the New Testament in the 16th century, rather than being translated into English as “the beginning and the end”.
“Last and final” is tautologous, by the way, but it is commonly employed as a portmanteau word — lastandfinal. I suspect this is largely due to its ubiquitous use in airport announcements all over the world. I am always irked when I hear “this is a last and final call for all outstanding passengers”. What about the merely average passengers?
Thousands of unhappy passengers, whether outstanding or mediocre, did not receive their last and final boarding calls when travel restrictions were imposed by some governments this week. We don’t yet know how many more countries might close their borders to people from SA and other places infested with omicron, because we don’t yet know how bad omicron is.
Nor do we know how many more variants might follow on the spiky heels of omicron, but the name-selection committee is going to run out of Greek letters soon, so we’d better all pull together to wipe these critters off the face of the earth before a new system of nomenclature is needed.
The sooner everyone gets vaccinated, the sooner the virus will run out of hosts and stop mutating, and the sooner we might reach the Omega of this devastating era.
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