O Delta, Delta, wherefore art thou Delta?

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.
In this day and age, of course, we’ve become aware that this method of naming things isn’t always helpful. To fight pandemics and other natural disasters, we need to cooperate rather than stigmatise one another. Whether naming individuals or diseases, it therefore seems best to avoid the temptation of “nominative determinism.”
Sars-CoV-2 added its own urgency to this emerging controversy by mutating so swiftly and ubiquitously that everybody would before
long have been stigmatising everybody else. Around Christmas, I was still holding a grudge against an offshore island that was clearly inhabited by irresponsible people exporting a “British” variant. When I then started being afraid of South Africans, Brazilians and other eponyms of new mutations, I realised it was time to move on to a better system.
So did the folks at the World Health Organization, fortunately. After all, their job is in part to foster multilateral harmony instead of national stereotypes. But what to do?
Using the technical jargon — B.1.1.7 for the type that emerged in Britain, B.1.351 for the one from South Africa and so on — wasn’t going to cut it in an age when people can’t even remember their own phone numbers. For the same reason, Treponema Pallidum never caught on for syphilis.
Mythology would have been fun, but then we tend to use that for things we look up to, metaphorically or literally. So planets, moons and constellations are named after Olympians, Titans and assorted other deities, with either their Greek or Roman names. But fearing infection by either Aphrodite or Venus just feels wrong — besides, she already gave us “venereal,” which at least makes a certain sense.

—Bloomberg