If you are asked to name the sub-variants of Covid-19 currently in circulation, it is likely that you will stutter and that you will say a series of letters and numbers that you can remember. The most prevalent variant of Covid-19 is Ômicron, with the BA.5 strain being the most recurrent, with other strains such as BA.4, BA.4 and BA.2 circulating in lower volume.
But now, there are new sub-variants of Ômicron that will potentially become the dominant strains: BQ.1, BQ.1.1, BF.7 or XBB, the latter which has already been detected in 35 countries. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) is also monitoring a variant with even more numbers: B.1.1.529.
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But what explains these confusing names full of letters and numbers, apparently random, which seems like a change from previous names? This ‘letter soup’ followed the one established by the World Health Organization (WHO), which established in May 2021 that the variants of Covid-19 would be designated following the Greek alphabet. After Alpha, there was Beta, Gamma, Delta and, finally, Omicron.
The Greek letter system did not replace other scientific names – responsible for ‘labels’ such as BA.5 or XBB –, as the idea was to simplify communication to the public about the most important viral variants.
The WHO names a new letter when the Covid-19 variant in question is significantly different from the previous one. In the last year, what has been verified are sub-lineages of the Omicron variant and not a totally new version of SARS-CoV-2, so there has not yet been a Pi variant of the disease (it would be the next letter in the Greek alphabet).
“What the general public needs to know and what each variant tells them in terms of risk. We will give new names, with letters of the Greek alphabet, to these variants when they are substantially different from each other” in terms of severity, evasion of immunity or transmissibility, explains Maria Van Kerkhove, technical officer for Covid-19 at WHO, in statements to the magazine. Team.
But some experts argue that the subvariant names also have implications for the general public. Peter Hotez, physician and co-director of the Vaccine Development Center at Children’s Hospital of Texas, USA, considers that these ‘Scrabble’ sub-variants (because the names seem to have come out of the famous board game) come to confuse the population and exemplifies: ‘Bivalent’ Covid-19 vaccines have been formulated for sub-variants BA.4 and BA.5 but, like BQ.1, BQ.1.1 are ‘descendants’ of BA.5, these vaccines also protect against the new sub-variants, something the general public would not be able to infer from the name alone.
T. Ryan Gregory, professor of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph, Canada, explains that the letters of the new sub-variants are very important because they are the way scientists communicate information about what has changed in the virus, such as this one. evolved or changed. The official added, however, that more common unofficial names should be created for the sub-variants, such as “Cerberus”, “Tufão” or “Grifo”. Peter Hotez suggests that if naming a new variant with another letter is not justified, names like ‘Omicron 1’ or ‘Omicron 2’ and so on should be created. The problem is that there are currently more than 300 sub-strains of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 to be analyzed.
According to Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO is working on “more robust methods” to assess when a variant of Covid-19 should have a different name, with a particular focus on how it manages to ‘escape’ the existing immunity in the body. “The ‘jump from Delta to Omicron was very dramatic, so it was easy to rename it. But now, the virus is undergoing more subtle mutations, so it’s a more complicated decision”, adds the WHO official.
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