- A rumor about a potential future virus called "Covid-22" reportedly spread on social media.
- The term originated from misinterpreted comments from an immunologist that spread on
Twitter . - A biology professor said that calling a variant "Covid-22" will confuse people.
A misleading rumor about a potential future virus called "Covid-22" spread on social media this week.
Although the phrase is no longer visible on Twitter's Trending tab as of Wednesday, $4 reported that "Covid-22" was trending in the US, with over 58,000 tweets on Monday afternoon. One Twitter user shared a purported $4 from when the trending hashtag was visible.
A Twitter spokesperson told Insider that the platform is "preventing the ['Covid-22'] phrase" from showing up in Trends per the platform's $4.
Forbes and other outlets traced the term back to $4, a Swiss immunologist and professor at ETH Zürich in Zürich, Switzerland. In a Sunday article in the German-language $4, Reddy seemingly used "Covid-22" to discuss the potential future of the coronavirus pandemic.
"The next phase of the pandemic, when Beta or Gamma get more infectious, and or Delta develops" is going to be a major problem, Reddy said in the article, which Insider translated from German to English. "Covid-22 could be even worse than what we're living through now," he said.
Reddy's quotes soon circulated online, with many people misinterpreting the comment and stoking concerns about $4. Some worried it could be more dangerous than the $4, which is now the predominant coronavirus variant in the US.
It turned out Reddy was more broadly referring to the next wave of the pandemic. Suggesting more names for the coronavirus and its variants will only confuse people, according to Dave Wessner, a biology professor at Davidson College.
A viral tweet spread the comments from a Swiss article
A major source of the Twitter outcry came from a viral tweet from the
"ALERT: New super variant named 'Covid-22' could be more dangerous than Delta strain, expert warned," Insider Paper wrote in the tweet, which amassed over 13,000 likes and 30,000 retweets, with thousands of people expressing confusion and fear in the comment section.
According to Google Trends, worldwide search interest for the phrase "Covid-22" spiked Monday afternoon, with "Sai Reddy" one of the main related queries.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the most popular tweets with the "#COVID22" hashtag were people sharing memes and reacting to seeing the term trending.
-gëneiva (@avieneg) $4
The term is not in line with how we name variants
Calling a variant "Covid-22" doesn't make sense on a few levels, Wessner said.
"It doesn't accurately reflect the biology, and I think introducing new names like that is just confusing the general public more than anything else," Wessner told Insider.
With each new variant, the illness hasn't changed to something new and the virus' fundamental biology hasn't changed, Wessner explained - so it wouldn't make sense to call a variant "Covid-22." That would reflect a different disease.
-apple (@agueroapple) $4
Even as variants like Delta emerge with mutations that make them $4 or $4, they're still recognizable as variations of SARS-CoV-2.
Reddy, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, clarified his comments in an interview with $4
"I of course agree that the proper and correct usage of the term for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 is COVID-19. I unfortunately did not realise that my use of the term 'COVID-21' or 'COVID-22' would lead to such a reaction," he said.
"What I meant to convey was that as SARS-CoV-2 evolves literally, our thinking about how to respond and deal with the pandemic should also evolve," he told the outlet.