Marginal cost of multiple nomenclature conventions for SARS-CoV-2 variants (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Scientists placed less aligned emphasis on naming the emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants, and yet a holistic standard nomenclature scheme for viral variants remains to be fleshed out and full-fledged. In the context of the COVID-19 infodemic, the global profusion of stigmatizing geographical names for those variants have found their way into daily communication at the cost of social stigma in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE This study examines why standard nomenclature for SARS-CoV-2 variants rises to the occasion, as well as the rational principles of a curated nomenclature framework for viral variants and abbreviations. METHODS In the scientometric analysis experiment, we retrieved the metadata of 693 articles from the Web of Science Core Collections between 30 December 2019 and 25 March 2021, to demonstrate the stigmatizing geographical names of SARS-CoV-2 variants in the scientific sphere. In the global online news coverage experiments, we examined the compiled global online news volumes and emotional tones between December 2019 and May 2021 to demonstrate the emotional polarity of the contextualizing stigma over time. The results could cover 65 multilingual textual and visual narratives by leveraging the capacity of GDELT’s machine translation and neural network image recognition. In the genomic epidemiology experiment, we reproduced the genomic epidemiology of evolutionary SARS-CoV-2 exemplified by 3955 genomes from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic based on the Nextstrain database. RESULTS The results of the scientometric analysis show that some racial stereotypes of SARS-CoV-2 variants like “UK variant” have found their way in scientific literature. The global online news coverage experiments also indicate that such flawed word-blends are widely professed in news outlets in 65 different languages. After December 2020, those contextualizing stigmas in textual and visual narratives with extremely negative tones are fuelling the current COVID-19 infodemic in up to 100 countries. The genomic epidemiology experiment exemplifies that simply distinguishing variants based on the presumed locations would introduce new confusions in both the scientific sphere and the public. CONCLUSIONS The surveys suggest that current collective propensities to contextualizing stigmas would result in social costs, without a one-size-fits-all nomenclature framework for SARS-CoV-2 variants. Such urgent concern that evoked by multiple nomenclature conventions needs coordinated global responses. As an integral component of preparedness, we propose the rational principles of a standard nomenclature framework for viral variants and abbreviations based on heuristic introspection of naming practices for viral variants.