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  • 2022-01-05 (xsd:date)
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  • Is 'COVID' an Acronym for COVID-19 Variants? (en)
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  • In January 2022, a video suggesting that COVID was an acronym for known and unknown variants of COVID-19 went viral on TikTok: COVID is not an acronym for known and unknown variants of COVID-19. This video plays on the conspiratorial idea that the pandemic was planned (it wasn't) and illustrates a common misconception about COVID-19 variants. While the omicron and delta variants have made headlines, there have actually been several additional variants. The above-displayed video lists four supposed variants (C for corona, O for omicron, I for IHU, and D for delta), but there have actually been several additional variants of COVID-19. Furthermore, corona isn't really a variant. Rather, it's shorthand for coronavirus, the family of viruses to which SARS-CoV-2, the specific virus that causes COVID-19, belongs. We'll discuss IHU in more detail in the next section. Omicron and delta are the most well known because they have had the most impact on the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists both of these strains as variants of concern, or a variant for which there is evidence of an increase in transmissibility, more severe disease (for example, increased hospitalizations or deaths), significant reduction in neutralization by antibodies generated during previous infection or vaccination, reduced effectiveness of treatments or vaccines, or diagnostic detection failures. The CDC has also discovered and is monitoring several other variants that are classified as variants being monitored. These variants, which include alpha, beta, gamma, epsilon, eta, iota, kappa, zeta, and mu, are variants that do not pose a significant and imminent risk to public health in the United States. In an article from John Hopkins Medicine, Stuart Ray, M.D., vice chair of medicine for data integrity and analytics, and Robert Bollinger, M.D., M.P.H., and Raj and Kamla Gupta professor of infectious diseases, talked more about why COVID-19 has mutated into new variants: The CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) have been using the Greek alphabet to name new COVID-19 variants. The viral TikTok video, however, mentions a COVID-19 variant named IHU, which is not a letter in the Greek alphabet. IHU refers to a variant that was recently discovered by doctors in France. This variant has not (as of this writing) received an official designation from WHO and is currently informally recognized as IHU after the HU Mediterranee Infection, a hospital in France where the variant was first discovered. WHO said that it was monitoring the variant but that, at the moment, there was little reason for concern. The New York Times reported: The viral TikTok video suggests that COVID is an acronym for both discovered and undiscovered variants. While the O, I, and D variants have all been identified, the V version of the coronavirus has yet to arrive, according to this TikTok. However, there likely will not be a V variant of COVID. As mentioned above, health officials have been naming new variants after letters in the Greek alphabet, but there is no V in the Greek alphabet. The next major variant will likely be named pi, followed by rho, sigma, and tau. (en)
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