“Deltacron”, a new and powerful embodiment of the coronavirus? Far from being proven, this hypothesis, which has been running all weekend, is the last episode in a series of media frenzy since the meteoric and very real rise of the Omicron variant at the end of 2021.
“There are currently people infected with both Omicron and Delta, and we have discovered a strain that combines the two,” Cypriot virologist Leondios Kostrikis told a local television station on Friday.
During the weekend, many international media picked up on this announcement and the name given by researchers to this new incarnation: “Deltacron”.
The name and the idea are likely to cause concern: a mixture between Delta, which dominated the pandemic for a good part of 2021, and Omicron, appeared at the end of the year and carried by a meteoric boom because of a very strong contagiousness.
But the scientific community quickly became skeptical. Several researchers pointed out that it was impossible to find a single line with the big twenty samples supposed of “Deltacron”. We can indeed reconstitute, from databases fed by researchers, the genealogical tree, known as “phylogenetic”, of a version of the virus.
Deltacron, flurona …
However, if “Deltacron” existed and marked the arrival of a new variant, the cases identified would come from a common core of successive mutations.
This is clearly not the case, and skeptical researchers are making a more prosaic hypothesis: samples would have become contaminated during their examination in the laboratory.
“” Deltacron “surely comes from contamination during sequencing,” researcher Maria Van Kerkhove, who leads the fight against COVID-19 at the World Health Organization (WHO), said on Twitter on Monday.
The media wave around Deltacron is only the latest after a series of excesses since the entry into the scene of Omicron.
Social networks and some press titles ignited at the turn of the new year around “flurona”, the nickname given to simultaneous co-infection with influenza (flu in English) and coronavirus.
This runaway, stemming from a case in an Israeli woman, did not take into account the fact that cases of double infections have been known since the start of the pandemic, rather stirring up the image of a new virus. “You must not use words like Deltacron or flurona”, warned Mme Kerkhove. They “suggest a combination of variants or viruses, which is simply not the case.”
Very closely watched variants
Finally, a number of Anglo-Saxon media and, to a lesser extent, French, worried at the beginning of 2022 about the emergence of a “French variant”, which would present many mutations and would be linked to a large number of hospitalizations in the south of the country.
This variant, identified as B.1.640.2, is very real and was spotted by British researchers in early December. But it has actually only been isolated in a very limited number of samples and there is no reason to relate to the predicament in hospitals in part of southern France.
These three cases of runaway may correspond to realities. For Deltacron, it is quite possible that existing variants will eventually fuse in people infected with both.
For “flurona”, the double infection of influenza and COVID-19 is a real concern, which for example pushes the French authorities to strongly encourage the elderly to be vaccinated against both.
Finally, the new variants remain closely watched. Epidemiologists regularly warn that a more contagious or more severe incarnation of the coronavirus could change the face of the epidemic. “There are variants that emerge all the time,” French epidemiologist Arnaud Fontanet recalled Monday on the BFMTV / RMC channel. But, in recent days, “no variant that is said to be worrying”.