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The World Health Organization's new naming system for SARS-CoV-2 variants assigns names drawn from the Greek alphabet.

The new names would only be to aid public discussion using labels that were "non stigmatising" to the countries where they were first identified

20-05-2021 WHO We spoke to Dr Richard Pebody, who leads the High-threat Pathogen team at WHO/Europe, to find out more about why the COVID-19 virus changes, what implications this has for public health, and what you as an individual can do to help and to stay safe. Why do viruses change? “First of all, I’d like to say that all viruses, including the COVID-19 virus, change over time as a natural phenomenon. Having said that, new variants of concern continue to challenge our pandemic response. “When a virus replicates or makes copies of itself as it spreads, the virus genome (the set of ge...

Science's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation Testing for COVID-19 at Johannesburg's airport in January. A variant of concern that arose in South Africa has spread around the world. PHOTO: GUILLEM SARTORIO/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES Last month, Gytis Dudas was tracking a concerning new coronavirus variant that had triggered an outbreak of COVID-19 in his native Lithuania and appeared sporadically elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Exploring an international database of coronavirus genomes, Dudas found a crucial clue: One sample of the new SARS-CoV-2 variant...

- Advertisement - India — Days after the World Health Organization (WHO) designated it a variant of concern or VOC, Canadian health authorities are now considering the B.1.617 mutation of Covid-19 in the same category. The variant, which was first detected in India, was added to the Public Health Agency of Canada’s VOC list on Thursday. In its Outbreak Update, the agency said that it was “following the variants of concern first identified in the United Kingdom (B.1.1.7), South Africa (B.1.351), Brazil (P.1) and India (B.1.617)”. It added, “Monitoring for genetic changes in the virus...