The never-ending list of Covid variants, including the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and of course, Omicron, have caused enough global damage during the on-going pandemic. The damage is not just at the physical level but at a psychological level as well. Everytime a new variant is detected, a sense of anxeity and fear can be felt in and around us. So when reports of another potential variant, ‘Deltacron’, started doing the rounds of internet, the world had gone into a frenzy. While some tried to lighten the mood with a hillarious meme fest, the majority were seen trying their best to gather more information about it. However, the World Health Organisation has announced that ‘Deltacron’ could most likely be the result of a lab contamination and not in fact, a new variant of Covid-19. The WHO added that ‘Deltacron’ is “not really a thing.”
WHO technical lead of Covid-19, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove said that ‘Deltacron’ could be a result of “contamination” that might have occurred during the sequencing process. Kerkhove also said that it is possible to get infected with different variants of SARS-CoV-2 as there have been examples of coinfection, in which people were infected with both influenza and Covid-19 “throughout this pandemic.”
‘Deltacron’ made headlines a few days back when a researcher, Leondios Kostrikis, in Cyprus claimed that this new strain of Coronavirus was named so because it is a combination of Delta and Omicron variants. Not long after, a Bloomberg report said that the statistical analysis by Kostrikis and his team had likely identified 25 cases of ‘Deltacron’.
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