01-05-2022, 02:10 PM
(01-05-2022, 12:21 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: why do we use a different word?
This piqued my curiosity, and a lot of it is the sort of typical result of colloquial use of technical terms. The difference between a variant and a strain doesn't appear to have hard lines in definition, but generally speaking mutations in reproduction cause variations. When those variations cause enough difference in behaviour, they become a strain.
SARS-CoV-2 is a strain of coronavirus with many variants. Those variants may end up diverging enough that they become distinct strains of coronavirus. From what I've read about this over my lunch break (and I'm a really shitty biologist, so consume with sodium and all that) some folks do argue that the variants of interest are in fact strains because they bind to different receptors and - especially in the case of Omicron - really do seem to have different behaviours.
My deeply uneducated guess is that there's a general consensus to call everything variants because it's the language that people know now in the context of Covid19, and generally speaking the masses don't do so great with nuance.