Naming Covid variants after places can lead to stigma – WHO

The WHO’s technical lead for Covid-19, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, said that the body was working on a nomenclature – the devising or choosing of names for things – for virus variants.

The WHO said it is important that countries are conducting surveillance of the virus and genomic sequencing to discover new variants without fear of stigmatisation for doing so.

New and emerging variants of Covid-19 should not be named after where they are first identified to avoid “stigmatising” a country or place, health leaders have said.

Experts working with the World Health Organisation (WHO) are developing new names for variants – which are often colloquially named after the places where they are first detected.