Why humor them? Their "Plain stupidity" comment without offering anything resembling reason shows they will not respond to reason. Don't encourage the Twitterification of Hacker News.
Use the evolutionary lineage nomenclature. If people can memorize street addresses and telephone numbers they can learn to identify viruses by some other pattern.
The other problem with naming a variant after a country or state is what happens when the locale identifies a subsequent variant?
The actual name for the variant in question is 501.V2.