All borders to reopen.

[nonsense]

Originally Posted by LapSap

More importantly, I want to know why the WHO skipped a couple of letters of the Greek alphabet and went for Omicron. Seeing as the letter before that is “Xi”, I wonder if there was a quick phone call from Beijing saying it wouldn’t be a good idea to call it that.

https://www.theage.com.au/world/euro...28-p59cu0.html

In a statement, the WHO said it skipped Nu for clarity and Xi to avoid causing offence generally.

“‘Nu’ is too easily confounded with ‘new,’ and ‘Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name,” the WHO said, adding that the agency’s “best practices for naming disease suggest avoiding ‘causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.‘”

Those best practices were outlined in a May 2015 document issued by the agency. The organisation said at the time that it wanted to “minimise unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people” when naming infectious diseases.