The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday decided not to use the “blurring and discriminatory” designations for variants of the Kovid-19, naming them with Greek letters such as alpha, beta and gamma. According to the WHO, the idea is to keep the name “easy to pronounce and remember”, but to prevent the general public and the media from using “stigmatized and discriminatory” names referring to the place where the first cases were detected. The organization said in a statement.

Scientific names will continue to exist, as they provide useful data to experts, but the WHO says it will no longer use them in its daily communications. The special agency of the United Nations urges national authorities, the media and others to adopt new names.

Thus, version B.1.1.4, first identified in the United Kingdom, was named Alpha; B.1.351, first identified in South Africa, became beta; And the P.1 variant, found in Brazil, Gamma. The WHO has given two different names to the separate sub-lines of the B.1.617 version, which devastated India and spread to dozens of countries: B.1.617.2 thus becomes a delta, and B. 1.617. 1 becomes a kappa.

While the epidemic, which has killed more than 3.5 million people worldwide since late December 2019, is raging, the highest infectiousness concerns countries for new forms of the virus.