The Covid never ceases to surprise the world during all its adaptations. He has just spawned a new strain: Deltacron. A variant that combines both Delta and Omicron. No name has yet been assigned to it but it is under close surveillance by public health France and according to scientists, it is worrying.
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Difficult to predict its characteristics: the most worrying thing would be that it has the virulence of delta and the contagiousness of Omicron. But for the moment no conclusion.
In any case, in all likelihood, the recombinant delta and omicron variant would very probably already be circulating at very low levels on national territory.
Last January, Cyprus claimed to have a few cases of what it then named “deltacron”. It was then the United Kingdom, then the United States and Australia which declared suspicions on their territories.
On February 11, the British health agency confirmed its first case of hybrid infection. France then implemented enhanced monitoring of Delta/Omicron co-infections. As of March 2, 18 cases have been confirmed.
Delta and Omicron
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After analysis, it turns out that the majority of the genome of this variant corresponds to Delta and that a large portion of the s gene, which makes it possible to penetrate the cell, corresponds to the Omicron variant.
Until then, very few recombination events between 2 variants had been reported, but the situation changed between December 2021 and January 2022 with the co-circulation of Delta and Omicron, genetically distant which may have facilitated their union