The technical names were just fine. It’s the damned media that made up the region-specific names. I blame the media here.
1 Like
What about the seven variants of masking up again then?
Covey2Cough-2r7B-Pantsruin
Covey2Cough-2r13f-Wheezecurrents
or
CoV2.5Gagger Humidmiasma, Humidpaingyres, and Shadeyextracrowds
or
CoV 2.419 Necktells Mac Opterabubbles
CoV 2.999 Chattymucker Extremoburns
CoV 2.420 Hangrytells Particlecrowds
too DFy?
CoV 2.pronate (Distrust that particular theatre)
CoV 2.massage-chair distance
CoV 2.touchyILsignals
4 Likes
What, like Able, Baker, Charlie, … ?
5 Likes
…Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot…
3 Likes
G as in Gnome, K as in Knife, M as in Mancy, P as in Pterodactyl.
5 Likes
Worse.
I think about Lancia Delta.
Cool car.
3 Likes
I suggest we name them all Bruce, to avoid confusion.
7 Likes
Despite all the Hanzi, there are only 372 unique syllables (actual sound combinations) in Chinese, and lots of homophones. Compare with Hangul, 11,172 possible syllables combinat…
…where you all going?
9 Likes
They’ll probably add numbers, or double greek letters.
We begin this week of April 21, 2025, with the rapid worldwide spread of COVID-19-Zeta 6 Beta, quickly overtaking all other variants in daily random street tests in all cities along the east coast. mRNA vaccines made for the Zeta 3 Zeta variant appear to be only somewhat effective against this new frightening variant.
In other news,
3 Likes
OK now I’m seeing the value of the phonetic alphabet
Greek has the “beta zeta eta theta epsilon upsilon” problem
1 Like
Before you know it well have an Alpha Phi Alpha Variant, and Faux News will be blaming the Frat Boys for spreading the virus… probably quite accurately.
6 Likes
Better than the xenophobia happening now.
4 Likes
If by non-zero you mean 100%, yes. And while the US has been plenty stupid about coronavirus, in this case it was pretty much inevitable. All of these variants are basically everywhere that has ongoing COVID. Very likely they all have been in circulation well before they were isolated, noticed, and named. Assuming that getting a complete elimination like new zealand did was infeasible, we were going to get these variants and countless others.
What happened that made them change from “variants” to “variants of concerns” was the observation that versions which were previously a small fraction of cases became highly prevalent or dominant in certain areas. This can happen by chance but could also indicate that the variant is out-competing the original. It might be more transmissible, or it might be able to more easily infect people with prior infections or vaccinations, or it just might be more adapted to the population of a given country. Even then, it isn’t necessarily a big deal. Thanks to exponential growth it doesn’t take a very big difference in infectivity to become dominant, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to meaningful difference to us.
3 Likes
Which one’s holding the sheep dip?
2 Likes
Why aren’t the new strains named things like covid-20, and covid-21 (named after the year they appeared, like the original one was)?
Because they’re still types of covid-19, or more pedantically the SARS-CoV-2 that causes that. Covid is short for Coronavirus disease, and there are a whole family of those, with this as just one species.
2 Likes
Given that frat boys are overwhelmingly white males, I find this unlikely.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
