It’s all Greek to me

So, just when we were all getting accustomed to hearing about the “Delta” variant of COVID-19, I came across a news report that said the first case of the “Lambda” variant had been reported in the U.S.

This prompted me to look into the number of variants that are out there, and it turns out there are six that have been labled with letters from the Greek alphabet. Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta are the ones of most concern. But there’s also Eta, Iota, Kappa and Lambda.

Other than sounding like some of the world’s worst fraternities, these may not mean much to you and me, but it turns out that each one of these variants has different levels of contagion and different symptoms and could or could not be resistant to the vaccines that are currently available. By most accounts, if you are vaccinated and you do get one of these variants, the symptoms are said to be much milder than if you are unvaccinated.

What does all this mean? Well, it means that the longer the coronavirus is allowed to hop around the population due to the remaining large number of unvaccinated people the more opportunity it will have to mutate into more variant strains. And the more variants there are, the more difficult it will be to put an end to the pandmic and the more chances the virus will have to evolve into something more deadly than it al ready has.

The other thing I know, is that there are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet and we’ve already used 8 of them on variants, and I don’t know about you but I do not want to contract anything called the “Omega Variant.”