I wonder why WHO skipped the letter Xi.
> But the United Nations public health agency avoided Nu and Xi for two reasons, a spokeswoman told The Post.
>
> “[For] Nu the reasoning was people would get confused thinking it was the new variant, rather than a name,” Dr. Margaret Harris said. “And XI because it’s a common surname and we have agreed [to] naming rules that avoid using place names, people’s names, animal, etc. to avoid stigma.”
The reasoning is sound, but if they'd annnounced the exact roster ahead of time, there'd be less suspicion. But WHO is really, really bad at public health communication!
Who is?
https://forebears.io/surnames/xi#:~:text=How%20Common%20Is%2....
How Common Is The Last Name Xi? It is the 708th most widely held family name at a global level, borne by approximately 1 in 9,415 people.https://forebears.io/earth/surnames
That's higher than 'Serrano', 'Meyer', 'Murphy', 'Parker', 'Çelik', 'Banerjee' - names I picked from the many other options because I know people with all those surnames who I'd not want to curse with a same-named disease variant.
Excluding many thousands of common given names, surname, place names, etc makes sense.
How Common Is The Last Name Xi? It is the 708th most widely held family name at a global level, borne by approximately 1 in 9,415 people.