Originally posted by Racer X 69 They skipped 4 characters from Alpha to Delta.
Wonder why they skipped from Delta to Omicron? That's 10 characters. Are they thinking there won't be many more mutations?
They did not (well, they did skip Nu and Xi, for obvious reasons) - it's just that Beta and Gamma were quite minor compared to Delta: the WHO has a list of all the previously considered Variants of Concern (VoC) here:
Tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants
At the top (current VoCs) one can see Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron. Delta was (and is) so problematic that it has eclipsed all the subsequent variants in terms of epidemiology
1, Omicron is under monitoring now.
1: Under "Variants of Interest", we have Mu and Lambda. Then we have "Variants under monitoring", down in the page, where one can see Kappa (B.1.617.1), Iota (B.1.526) and Eta (B.1.525), while "Formerly monitored variants" lists Epsilon, Zeta and Theta.