Is ‘Deltacron’ A New COVID-19 Hybrid? 5 Things You Need To Know

ACROSS AMERICA — Add “deltacron” to the running list of words you need to know to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic.

Deltacron is a coronavirus hybrid of sorts, according to a team of researchers led by Leondios Kostrikis, professor of biological sciences at the University of Cyprus.

They coined the term after discovering signatures similar to the omicron variant within delta genomes in 25 cases of COVID-19, according to Bloomberg News, which reported on the study Saturday.

Eleven of the cases were among people who were already in the hospital with COVID-19, and the other 14 were among the general public, Kostrikis said on Sigma TV, according to Bloomberg.

Should You Worry?

It’s too early to know how persistent or contagious the strain is, the researchers said.

Bloomberg reported that when he announced the study Friday on Sigma TV, Kostrikis said “we will see in the future if this strain is more pathological or more contagious or if it will prevail” and overtake the delta and omicron, the dominant variants in coronavirus infections worldwide.

Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes, chief of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, concurred.

“It's much too early for us to tell yet whether the deltacron is going to be a real threat or not,” Kuritzkes told news station WBTS on Monday. “We know that people can get infected with a mixture of different coronavirus strains, and then those strains have an opportunity to mix together and do what we call recombination that generates these sort of hybrid viruses. Whether this is going to take off in the way that delta did or that omicron has done — only time will tell.”

Or Should You Doubt It?

Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London’s Department of Infectious Disease in Great Britain, said in a series of tweets that the researchers’ findings about deltacron may be a lab mistake.

“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," he tweeted.

“I should add as well — this is not really related to ‘quality of the lab’ or anything similar — this literally happens to every sequencing lab occasionally!” Peacock added in another tweet. “This is particularly true with high ct value swabs (ie low levels of virus) and using older primer sets.”

Is Deltacron Just Another Portmanteau?

Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, COVID-19 expert for the World Health Organization, concurred the likelihood of a “lab contamination of Omicron fragments in a Delta specimen.”

She went farther, though, and said people need to stop coming up with portmanteaus to describe research findings.

“Okay people let’s make this a teachable moment, there is no such thing as #Deltacron (Just like there is no such thing as #Flurona),” she tweeted.

The announcement of the study from the Cypriot team comes a week after “flurona” was added to the coronavirus lexicon. It’s a nonscientific term that describes when people are simultaneously diagnosed with influenza and COVID-19.

Kuppalli wrote in a subsequent tweet, “Let’s not merge of names of infectious diseases and leave it to celebrity couples.”

But Watch What Happens

Dr. Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious diseases expert at Emory University in Atlanta, cautioned people from reading too much into reports of the hybrid until more is known.

“Just because I have been asked about it many times in the last 24h, please interpret with caution,” she tweeted Sunday. “The information currently available is pointing to contamination of a sample as opposed to true recombination of #delta and #omicron variants.”

But she said the possibility shouldn’t be dismissed that the genetic material specific to each variant could mix as the delta and omicron variants continue to circulate.

“Recombination can occur in coronaviruses. The enzyme that replicates their genome has a tendency to slip-off the RNA strand it is copying and then rejoining where it left off. With #delta and #omicron both in circulation, dual infection with both variants increases this concern,” she tweeted.

She added “the best thing we can do besides worrying about it and coining variant names that sound like a ‘Transformers’ villain, is ensuring that vaccines are available to everyone and combining vaccination with other strategies that give the virus fewer opportunities to spread.”

What Happens Now?

The Cypriot team sent its findings on deltacron to the GISAID global science initiative (Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data), which tracks coronavirus variants.

In an emailed statement to Bloomberg Sunday, Kostrikis said his findings are not the result of a “technical error,” CNBC reported. Rather, he said, the cases his team identified “indicate an evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event.”