O Delta, Delta, Wherefore Art Thou Delta?
A coronavirus variant should be no scarier whether it’s named B.1.617.2, Indian or delta. But the labelling still matters.
This one’s alpha through delta, try next month for lambda.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In the early days of the pandemic, a Sinophobic American president delighted in melodramatically calling the bug “the China virus.” After all, it was nasty — another word he relishes — just like, in his opinion, that rival power.
In terms purely of nomenclature, Donald Trump was actually in excellent historic company. As long as anybody can remember, people have been naming bad stuff they don’t understand after other people they don’t like. A few centuries ago, before anybody knew what a bacterium was, Italians, Germans and Britons called syphilis “the French disease.” The Russians named it “the Polish disease,” the Polish “the German disease,” and so forth.