Delta Air Lines and Delta COVID-19 variant: Airline's issue with virus naming system

It's a problem that's been faced by dozens of companies over the years, through no fault of their own - what happens when your brand name becomes associated with something bad? In the middle of last decade, dozens of companies around the world with the name "Isis" found themselves tarnished by the same name being used by an Islamist terrorist group - many resorted to changing their names. Last year, Mexican beer Corona fell victim to a misinformation campaign spread on social media that associated the brand with the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak (it didn't hurt, in the end - sales actually increased). Now, the world's biggest airline by revenue, America's Delta Air Lines is facing a similar problem - the new, highly contagious strain of COVID-19 that has been labelled "Delta" by the WHO. "We just call it the variant," Delta CEO Ed Bastian told the Wall Street Journal last week. The airline, which is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, in America's south, is named after the Mississippi Delta region, where the airline started out as a crop dusting business.<br/>