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With the arrival of the variant of COVID BA.1 and BA.2, known as Ómicron, the scientific community stopped giving new names to the alterations of the virus, which makes the situation around the pandemic is uncertain, and there is a “false sense of security” while the possibility of a new health alert remains in force.
In 2021, after the first variants of COVID appeared, the World Health Organization (WHO) decided to give them Greek names in order to avoid denominations that could be stigmatizing or discriminatory depending on the region, for example: ‘Brazilian strain’.
The result was names like Delta, Gamma, Alpha and Beta in the variants of attention; however with omicron, which appeared at the end of November 2021, everything changed, since by itself, this COVID mutation was very different in its genetics than the others.
Since then, the new infections with omicron, which caused three waves of cases in Mexico, are carried out by variants such as BA.5, XBB, BQ.1, etc. that according to experts, are sublineages that evade vaccines; however, they do not have their own denomination, since the concern for naming them ended months ago.
According to CNN, in the last year with two months 650 omicron sublineages were identified.
How are omicron variants named now?
The scientific community refers to the ‘X’ in the variants as a recombinant, that is, when two viruses exchange genetic material. Meanwhile, the letters are a denomination with which they divide the subvariants.
For example, the XBB variant, known as ‘the nightmare’, is the result of mutations that started with XA until reaching XZ, later there were sublineages with XAA until reaching XAZ and finally XBA and XBB subvariants arrivedhaving the alphabet as a reference.
Is everything omicron?
Biologist Michael Worobey told CNN that it is fitting that the Greek names for the new sub-variants of omicron not continue; However, COVID, a virus that emerged in China in 2019, continues to mutate, and the fact that the risk subvariants do not have a name creates a “false sense of security.”
In October 2022, the case of a person infected with the Delta variant of COVID was detected, only that it had 17 mutations, and according to the doctor, it was a variant that camped and chronically affected a person with comorbidities.
These types of viruses have the potential to create a new health alert according to Dr. Worobey, while Bette Korber, who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States, said that “the intra-omicron variants are really pronounced and distinctive. Not that omicron is a single thing at all. It has evolved tremendously.”
Other specialists such as Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, point out that it is important that the names of the omicron subvariants are easier to communicate. without sowing panic in the people.
With information from CNN.
