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ARCHIVED - Deltacron panic over as lab admits to unfortunate error
Scientists believe that the Cypriot Covid variant ‘probably doesn’t exist’
With the world battling the sixth wave of the pandemic, more worrying news came for Cyprus just days ago when the health authorities announced they had uncovered 25 cases of yet another mutation: a co-infection of the Omicron and Delta variants.
But seemingly overnight, the “monstrous” threat appears to have dissolved and scientists admit that the results were most likely a technical error made by the Cypriot laboratory tasked with sequencing the samples.
Cyprus re-examined its results when leading health experts around the globe questioned the variant, with Eric Topol at the Scripps Research Translation Institute calling Deltacron a “scariant” that people shouldn’t be concerned about.
"Deltacron" is a scariant.
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) January 9, 2022
One less thing to worry about.
Likewise, Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, said that it is impossible that the Delta and Omicron strains could have recombined into a new variant because the latter simply hasn’t been in circulation long enough to mutate to that extent.
Small update: the Cypriot 'Deltacron' sequences reported by several large media outlets look to be quite clearly contamination - they do not cluster on a phylogenetic tree and have a whole Artic primer sequencing amplicon of Omicron in an otherwise Delta backbone.
— Tom Peacock (@PeacockFlu) January 8, 2022
Following these embarrassing revelations, the first independent analyses show that Deltacron is most likely “a technical error of the Cypriot laboratory in the process of reading the genome”. Regardless, the samples will still undergo intensive study.
Meanwhile, the WHO is focusing its attention on the so-called IHU variant detected by the Marseille University Hospital Institute in December, which is believed to contain far more mutations than Omicron.
Image: Ministerio de Sanidad
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