Thoughts on Greek letters

Health authorities have officially discontinued the practice of referring to new diseases or variants of diseases by place of origin. Instead, they will now use Greek letters. This is a good thing.

NOAA has said they will no longer use Greek letters to name hurricanes. If they get to the end of the alphabet, as happened last year, they will start over again from A. This is also a good thing.

Why?

Personification is a powerful human habit, and like most habits, it has upsides and downsides. The downside of the place-of-origin convention for diseases is that the disease becomes assocaited with its place of origin and the people who live there and were its first victims. It's a short step from there to blaming. The hateful slurs about the "China virus" and "kung flu" are still with us, and likely won't go away any time soon.

On the other hand, I saw very clearly that last year's late-season hurricanes with Greek-letter names simply weren't taken as seriously. Some of that was certainly disaster fatigue, as the Year Whose Name is Written on the Walls of Hell ground on and on through plague, wildfire, smoke, and floods. But I also strongly suspect that human-type names make the threat from a named storm seem just that little bit more real.

Anything that makes people take evacutaion warnings and threats more seriously...

Besides, if a Greek-letter-named storm happened to reach the threshold where a storm's name is usually retired - what then? Anyway, I am thinking about this as I'm about to post a couple of hurricane poems.

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