Get lineage aliases

What this is?Aagghhh my eyes

If you type in a lineage, for example BA.5, you get back a list of BA.5 aliases.

What this is not

This is not a list of all sublineages. Just the aliases.

For example, if you put in BA.5, you will not get BA.5.3.

But you will get BA.5.3.1, which is aliased to BE.

We also don't validate if the lineage you enter is valid. We just trust that you know what you are doing.

Finally, this is not automatically updated. If you depend on having the very latest data, grab it from the pango-designation GitHub repo instead.

So why would I want this?

Let's say you're trying to filter a list of PANGO lineages to just BA.5. Easy enough right?

We just pick everything that starts with "BA.5"

But this would miss out, say BE, BF and BQ - which are also BA.5 sublineages. In fact there are many others we'd be missing out.

So what we do here is type in BA.5, and now we know all the stuff we have to include in out "starts with" filter.

Alternatively, you could dealias everything and filter to stuff that starts with B.1.1.529.5, but who has time for that?

Why are the results presented in 3 different ways?

These are to assist my most common use cases for a list of aliases:

• Joining a list of lineages with an unaliased list
• Using a list of lineages to do something in Python
• Writing an SQL query that filters on lineage

What about recombinants?

I'm pretending they don't exist

None of that explained anything. What is any of this?

Oh. You might want to check out https://www.pango.network/ for an explanation of the PANGO naming scheme for SARS-CoV-2 lineages.