The first law of ecology is that title above, at least as written in Barry Commoner's 1971  The Closing Circle:  Nature, Man and Technology .   A  further searc h indicated that the adage is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, who died in 1519.  But there is very little to support this contention. From German  philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1769: In nature everything is connected, everything is interwoven, everything changes with everything, everything merges from one into another . Close, but what about U.S. jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote: If the world is a subject for rational thought it is all of one piece; the same laws are found everywhere, and   everything is connected with everything else;   and if this is so, there is nothing mean, and nothing in which may not be seen the universal law. And there is an environmental inspiration from U.S. naturalist John Muir in 1869: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the

Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron viruses are all different variants of SARS-CoV-2, shortened by the World Health Organization ( WHO ) to COVID-19.  The current BA.5 dominant virus is a subvariant of the Omicron subvariant.    Read this summary   by WHO to learn about the evolution of COVID-19. In August of last year, 2021, WHO was especially concerned about the emerging Delta variant, and had already designated variants Eta, Iota, Kappa and Lambda, plus 13 additional variants, or 25 variants in all.  Then came Omicron to completely dominate.   In November of 2021 the state of the field was: While not every one of the thousands of COVID-19 variants gets a Greek letter, the list of them has piled up to omicron, the 15th symbol on the Greek alphabet. Alpha, beta, gamma delta and omicron are all currently labeled as “variants of concern,” the highest alert level from the World Health Organization. There are two other ranking stages underneath that one: “variants of interest” and “vari