It’s so great when natural language usage/evolution is overwritten by bureaucrats, for god knows what reason. Wonderful.

The decision might seem strange, but I think the rationale behind it is sound:

"Covid-19 variants to be given Greek alphabet names to avoid stigma" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-varia...

Now the Greeks get all the stigma.

Nah we're good with it.

Apart from the stigma it was causing Indian people it was making a lot of people think it was a problem confined to India.

Were you not aware that the Indian government threatened social media platforms that allowed users to identify a variant as the 'Indian variant'?

We're gonna need a bigger alphabet

it's base 24. after going from single character alpha to omega, then you introduce the second character: alpha alpha, alpha beta, ...

Use of decimal numbers sounds better all of a sudden for naming the virus variants. :-)

seems the decimals are already currently being used for virus strains: sars-cov1, sars-cov-2...

for variants it could be minor versions such as sars-cov-2.4 but then there may be confusion about them being related sequentially and that one is an "improvement" over the other. :)

That's just differentiating nominal numbers from others [1]. The same is much too common everywhere -- zipcodes, student ID number, etc. I am still missing reason why the suggested base 24 is better. :-)

[1] https://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/cardinal-ordinal-nominal....

i'm mostly joking. it's not better, at least not to me.

The said joking is/was good with me. :-)