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sharken

That seems to be the key question here, so hopefully someone with more insight can answer that.

The Delta name for the Indian variant is from the new Greek letter naming scheme.

Four out of 24 letters are in use so far:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-57308592

UPDATE: A total of 10 letters are now in use according to WHO

https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-varian...

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It’s so great when natural language usage/evolution is overwritten by bureaucrats, for god knows what reason. Wonderful.

The decision might seem strange, but I think the rationale behind it is sound:

"Covid-19 variants to be given Greek alphabet names to avoid stigma" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-varia...

Now the Greeks get all the stigma.

Nah we're good with it.

Were you not aware that the Indian government threatened social media platforms that allowed users to identify a variant as the 'Indian variant'?

Apart from the stigma it was causing Indian people it was making a lot of people think it was a problem confined to India.

We're gonna need a bigger alphabet

it's base 24. after going from single character alpha to omega, then you introduce the second character: alpha alpha, alpha beta, ...

Use of decimal numbers sounds better all of a sudden for naming the virus variants. :-)

seems the decimals are already currently being used for virus strains: sars-cov1, sars-cov-2...

for variants it could be minor versions such as sars-cov-2.4 but then there may be confusion about them being related sequentially and that one is an "improvement" over the other. :)

That's just differentiating nominal numbers from others [1]. The same is much too common everywhere -- zipcodes, student ID number, etc. I am still missing reason why the suggested base 24 is better. :-)

[1] https://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/cardinal-ordinal-nominal....

i'm mostly joking. it's not better, at least not to me.

The said joking is/was good with me. :-)

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