What will Covid variants be called, once they reach the end of the Greek alphabet?

They’ll resort to a device like the hurricane names. We’ll see variants Alphonse, Betty, Chris, Deborah, Enrico…

Or maybe they will sell the privilege of having one named after yourself or someone else. Wouldn’t you pay to have one named after your most or least favorite anime character?

Simple sequential numbers might be proposed, and there’s a certain pragmatism there, but who is going to remember if they had number 45 or number 54?

Doubling up only postpones the inevitable: alpha alpha, alpha beta, alpha gamma…

Or—wait. Name them after insects. “Bugs,” right? Like the covid bug. That way they will never run out. There are between 1.5 million and 7 million species (or 30 million if you want to believe those estimates). Anyway, a lot. More than enough if you want to start combining them: epsilon Deborah borer beetles, epsilon Deborah carpenter ants…

Who says this couldn’t be fun?

The pandemic officially ends after they run out of Greek letters.

There’s only nine left, so that’s ^^^ good news. Wonder why we haven’t heard more about that from people who know everything.

Omega is the last one in the Greek alphabet. They could call it X after that. Or Armageddon.

Don’t worry, this is the countdown to world domination. We are almost there.

They’ve skipped a lot of the Greek letters to get to Omicron.

@Jeruba, what do you mean there’s only 9 left? There are 24 letters, and we’ve only used alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, iota and omicron. Or am I missing something?

@smudges Popsilon?

@RedDeerGuy1 LOL Love it!

@smudges, oops, I didn’t know they’d skipped letters. How foolishly spendthrift of them. I just assumed I hadn’t followed the news well enough and we’d already used up the first 15. There are nine left following omicron: pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega. So that’s how I was counting.

@kritiper, ha, X is already in the Greek alphabet.

Maybe we can name them then after their topographical birthplace?

@smudges “There are 24 letters, and we’ve only used alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, iota and omicron. Or am I missing something?”

You are missing something. There are variants named for each of the Greek letters from alpha to omicron except for nu and xi, which are traditionally skipped over due to the potential for confusion (“nu” is easily confused with “new,” and “xi” is a common surname in parts of the world).

They’ll start naming them after the vaccine you will be required to get for it.

@SavoirFaire Thanks for the info. I had no idea there had been that many variants!

@Jeruba I stand corrected, they didn’t skip letters! If I counted right, there are 11 letters left.

@Jeruba Armageddon isn’t in there at all.

@kritiper, it is if you look at it this way:

Armageddon (/ˌɑːrməˈɡɛdən/, from Ancient Greek: Ἁρμαγεδών Harmagedōn

You can’t say that isn’t in the Greek alphabet.

@Jeruba I don’t think anyone is looking at it that way. If I thought my answer to the OP’s question would be so strategically deciphered, I wouldn’t have answered it.

After they run through the Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese alphabets I think the plan is to offer naming rights to tech & media firms.

So you’ll get sick from Metaverse in ways you never expected.

Oh, dear, @kritiper, it was just a little joke—a twist on the meaning of “in.” Sorry if it upset you.

They could start adding the year number, that is why it is COVID 19. Time to update to COVID 22.

A variants discovered in January could restart at 22 Alpha.

“A variants discovered in January could restart at 22 Alpha.”
So Covid would be one of Mother Nature’s “attack patterns”.