Just in case you wanted to know…

….How the Covid variant names are chosen:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/omicron-variant-meaning-greek-alphabet-b1965952.html

WHO has faced criticism from some quarters for skipping two letters of Greek alphabet while naming a new variant

The WHO has named the latest variant of the Covid-19 virus “omicron”, saying it has become a variant of concern since it was first identified in South Africa on 9 November and that it poses a “very high” global risk with potentially severe consequences.

Earlier on in the pandemic, new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were given scientific names with a complex combination of letters and numbers.

It meant that for shorthand, variants typically ended up being referred to by the country where they were first identified — a system which experts said resulted in stigma against the people of those countries, as well as some confusion and misreporting.

The WHO in May 2021 announced a simple naming system for new variants of the virus. It said that each new variant would be named after successive letters in the Greek alphabet.

As such, one of the first variants with significant mutations which was first sequenced in Britain — B.1.1.7 — was named alpha, and a potentially menacing variant that emerged in South Africa in 2020 was named beta.

Keeping up with the method, the WHO named the new B.1.1.529 variant omicron, which is the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet. The letter omicron is equivalent to a short-sounded English letter “O”.

The word is a compound from the Greek “o mikron,” meaning “small o.” In classical Greek, the word was pronounced with the second syllable sounding like an English “me”…

The word literally means “little O” (o mikron, micron meaning “little”) as opposed to “great O” (ō mega, mega meaning “great”)…

Try inserting this info into the conversation at your next social gathering….

If you don’t get booed, or pooh- poohed, you’ll likely end up talking about when/whether you’ll get boosted…

Keeping in mind that there’s sure to be plenty of ‘omicron’ to go around just as in the previous sentence…

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