A lot about COVID-19 has been divisive, including the names we call it and its subvariants. In January, you might have heard people referring to the then-dominant U.S. strain as Kraken, and like me, wondered where that name came from. My colleague Jamie Ducharme looked into it at the time, and found a Canadian scientist named Ryan Gregory at the head of a team of Twitter academics giving COVID-19 variants nicknames.

Since then, their operation has matured, and in February, the team published a formal proposal for nicknaming variants. Rather than monster names like Kraken, which some worried could be a tad dramatic, the new system uses the names of celestial objects like planets, moons, and stars—like Arcturus. It also includes a handy lettering structure that can tell you about a variant based on the spelling of its nickname.

Despite its popular appeal, mainstream public health agencies have not embraced the system. Just this weekend, one of the World Health Organization's top COVID-19 officials explicitly asked that people refrain from using nicknames for strains like XBB.1.5 (Kraken, from Gregory's team's first naming convention) and XBB.1.16 (Arcturus, from the team's latest nomenclature). Still, it seems increasingly likely that the practically DIY naming system that is clearer and catchier may overtake the official Dewey Decimal system-like approach.

READ MORE