Goodbye U.K.variant, hello Alpha. The World Health Organization is adopting a new protocol for naming variants of COVID-19—identifying them by a letter of the Greek alphabet instead of by country of origin, the BBC reports. “No country should be stigmatized for detecting and reporting variants,” Maria Van Kerkhove of WHO wrote in a tweet. There are only 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, however, so it’s possible WHO will have to come up with a completely new naming system at some point in the future. The scientific names for each variant will remain; the letters are being used for public discussion.
