in case you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to look at the discussion over at Allow virus species names to include numbers - Feature Requests - iNaturalist Community Forum for other virus-related taxonomic change requests. if you all go down the path of handling virus classification rules, it might make sense to handle them all together rather than separately.
personally, in my non-viral-taxonomist mind, the other things discussed there seem like higher priority items than italicization rules discussed here. honestly though, not that viruses aren’t important, but i sort of question whether it’s really worth the effort to accommodate special viral classification rules at all, considering there are currently 2000 viral observations out of 65 million total observations…