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The stigma of variant names
Coronavirus variants will now be referred to by letters of the Greek alphabet instead of where they were first discovered, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday, in a bid to prevent the stigmatization of entire communities.
For example, instead of the “UK variant” (B.1.1.7), the WHO will now say “Alpha;” the “South African variant” (B.1.351) is now “Beta;” and the P.1 variant, first detected in Brazil, has been labeled “Gamma,” CNN’s Jacqueline Howard reports.
Throughout history, infectious diseases have been named after geographic locations where they were thought to have originated: West Nile virus, Zika and Ebola, to mention a few. But those associations can be damaging for those places, its people and, in some cases, be inaccurate. There is no universal consensus on where Spanish flu began, for example.
Peru has significantly revised its official record of deaths caused by Covid-19, increasing the number almost threefold. The change was made after a review proposed new criteria for linking deaths to the virus.
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Peru more than doubles its official Covid-19 death toll
Peru has more than doubled its official death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic following a government review of the figures, leaving the country with the highest coronavirus-related death rate per capita in the world.
Its Prime Minister Violeta Bermudez told a press conference that the figure was changed from 69,342 on Sunday to 180,764 on Monday following advice from a panel of Peruvian and international experts, and it covers coronavirus-related deaths between March 1, 2020 to May 21, 2021. “It [is] our duty to make the updated information public, not only as part of our commitment to transparency, but also to comply with our obligations as a state,” Bermudez added.
Peru more than doubled its official coronavirus death toll following a government-ordered review, making it the nation with the worst death rate per capita, according to Johns Hopkins University data.