When you name your kid, you never think that one day they’ll share a name with a deadly virus, then suddenly they do.
Naming your child can feel like a monumental task. Among other things, you wonder how the perception of the name might change over the years. Parents who named their daughter Karen know just what we mean—as do celeb mom-of-two Kristen Bell and her husband Dax Shepard. The name they chose for their youngest daughter has turned out to be a bit of a yikes moment, because of COVID-19.
In case you forgot or perhaps didn’t know, her youngest daughter has quite a unique name: Delta.
The name was beautiful when the celeb couple revealed it back in 2014—and it still is today—but with the latest and most concerning variant of COVID-19 being called the “Delta variant,” it understandably sucks to have the name be associated with something that’s causing a lot of death and illness around the world.
Kristen recently spoke about her daughter’s name during an episode of her limited-series podcast, We’re Supported By, when her co-host Monica Padman asked her: “Can I ask you a real talk question? How do you feel about Delta’s name being Delta right now?”
“It’s a big, big bummer,” replied Kristen, who is known for being quite candid about her kids and parenting choices. “But I’m really hoping that the Delta variant won’t be as strong as the original COVID and people will still say ‘corona.’ I mean, it’s a bummer for Corona, the beer company.”
Luckily, Delta is still young enough and has retained enough childhood wonder to simply be thrilled whenever she sees her unique name pop up around her. “She’s six, so she’s impressed every time she sees a Delta Airlines ad or anything,” Kristen continued. “She’s like ‘Oh my gosh, my name!’ So every time she hears anyone talk about the variant, she’s like ‘my name!’”
The Frozen star followed up by joking that perhaps having the variant share her privileged daughter’s name is a way to take her down a notch. “Maybe it’s a good thing because her life’s really easy,” Kristen joked. “She’s privileged and she’s got a lot of charisma—she’s a little ball of magic and she gets away with everything because of that. She can either give you puppy dog eyes or make you laugh and because of that, her life is too easy. So maybe she does need this to follow her around forever.”
We’re with you, Kristen, hopefully the Delta variant doesn’t have too huge an impact on the world. And with any luck, there won’t be anymore new variants and their dog Epsilon won’t share the same fate. (Just kidding—they don’t have a dog named Epsilon.)
