An unusual side effect of the coronavirus is the regular appearance of the Greek alphabet in newspaper headlines. The highly contagious Omicron variant has broken through in more ways than one: the Greek alphabet has made it into the Style section. What is this penchant for using Greek to designate disasters?
During hurricane season, if meteorologists use up the approved letters of the English alphabet, they have traditionally turned to Greek for naming storms. In recent years, we got as far as Hurricane Iota. During the pandemic, scientists with the World Health Organization are relying on Greek to make the variants of the coronavirus easier to talk about and to avoid associations with the names of places where the variants were initially detected; for instance, the strain with the designation B.1.617.2, which was first identified in India, is popularly known as the Delta variant. Although it was unlikely that, even with global warming, a single hurricane season could yield enough storms to run through both alphabets, the pandemic threatens to deplete our store of Greek in no time. Having reached omicron (ο), we are already more than halfway through the alphabet.
If this seems to be happening too fast, it’s partly because scientists have skipped some letters. They got to mu (μ), which is right in the middle, and then left out nu (ν), because it sounds confusingly like “new”; we can’t go around talking about a new Nu variant of interest. They also skipped the next letter, xi (ξ), not because it looks so exotic, sitting there between “N” and “O,” but because Xi is a Chinese surname and, one cannot help but notice, the surname of the guy who runs China.
More information: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/comma-queen/a-linguistic-look-at-omicron