Omicron: where does the variant Covid-19 name come from? The Greek letter’s relationship to ‘eye’, its merging with ‘omega’, and why it’s not STEM-friendly

Alpha, beta, gamma, delta … Ever since the World Health Organization determined in May 2021 that its nomenclature for important strains in the Sars-CoV-2 variant classification would adopt Greek-letter names (as opposed to place-of-origin names, such as “Wuhan virus” or “South African variant”, the practice criticised for contributing to xenophobia and racism), we have all become a little more fluent in the Greek alphabet.An ancestor of this alphabet you are reading now and of all modern…

Read the original article at South China Morning Post