COVID-19: Why do virus variants have fancy names?

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) has called SARS-CoV-2 a member of the family of other viruses detected earlier, SARS-CoV, making it clear that it is a completely new virus. It has also been included in the taxonomic category of CoV or Coronavirus, named after the extensions it bears above its nucleus that resemble the solar corona.

For the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “It is important to have a name to avoid using other names that could be inaccurate or stigmatizing. It also gives us a standard format to use in future outbreaks of other and new versions of the coronavirus.“. It is for this reason that the WHO set up in 2015 an instruction manual for designating diseases. To know, These names should not contain geographic locations, names of people, animals or types of food, or any reference to any particular culture or industry..

For the molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, Emma Hodcroft, “the difficult one is to find different names, informative, which do not imply geographical references and which are pronounceable and memorable”, adding :, but in fact, there is a lot of demand to try to convey all this information ”.

Scientists name variants when changes in the genome coincide with new growth, but only draw attention to them when there is a change in behavior.: if they are more easily transmitted, for example (B.1.1.7, the variant observed for the first time in Great Britain), or if they escape, at least in part, the immune response (B.1.351 , the variant detected in South Africa).

Viruses are constantly changing by mutation, and new variants of the virus should appear over time. Sometimes new variants emerge and then disappear. At other times, new variants appear and persist.

Trevor Bedford, evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said:“There are thousands and thousands of variations and we need a way to label them.” And in a similar vein, Oliver Pybus, an evolutionary biologist from Oxford, said that “you cannot trace something that you cannot name”.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “this new system will give disturbing variants an easy to pronounce and remember name and will also minimize unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people.”

“Unless one of them really becomes some sort of lingua franca, it will confuse things,” said the molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern. If you don’t get something that people can easily say and type, and easily remember, they’ll revert to the geographic name, he added.

But, according to Tulio de Oliveira, geneticist at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in Durban and member of the WHO working group, “we need to design a system that not only evolutionary biologists can understand. “At the same time, he demanded not to feed xenophobia and aggression against people of Asian descent around the world, as long as he is named“ Chinese virus ”or“ Wuhan virus ”.

Some inspiration suggestions in names might be those based on hurricanes, Greek letters, birds, or the names of other native animals and monsters. Others advise colors to indicate how the different constellations of mutations were related. Sometimes, Identifying a new variant by its characteristic mutation may be sufficient, especially when the mutations take on fancy names.underlines Áine O’Toole, doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh.

The numbering system that WHO considers is simple. Any new name will have to overcome the ease and simplicity of geotags for the general public.. And scientists will need to strike a balance between labeling a variant quickly enough to avoid geographic names and carefully enough not to end up naming trivial variants. “What I don’t want is a system in which we have a long list of variants, all with WHO names, but in reality only three are important and the other 17 are not,” Seattle Cancer Research Center evolutionary biologist Fred Hutchinson pointed out. Whatever the system, it will have to be accepted by different groups of scientists and the general public.

KEEP READING: