The deltacron variant — a coronavirus variant that combines the omicron variant and the delta variant — is real, scientists told Bloomberg News.
Over the weekend, the country of Cyprus said it discovered a COVID-19 variant that combines the omicron and delta variants, per CNBC.
- Specifically, the variant has “omicron-like genetic signatures within the delta genomes,” according to CNBC.
Leondios Kostrikis, professor of biological sciences at the University of Cyprus, said 25 cases of the virus had been found. Any transmissibility and severity of the data remain unclear, according to CNBC.
- “We will see in the future if this strain is more pathological or more contagious or if it will prevail,” Kostrikis said.
Experts are unsure if the deltacron variant is real or not. Biologist Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Translational Institute said deltacron might be a “scariant” born out of error.
- “New subtype of scariant that isn’t even a real variant but scares a lot of people, unnecessarily,” he tweeted.
Kostrikis defended his findings, though, telling Bloomberg that the cases he identified “indicate an evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event.”
It’s unclear if the deltacron variant is real or not. But it’s another sign of the potential for the novel coronavirus, which continues to grow and mutate as more variants are created.