A health worker in protective suit collects mouth swab of a traveler to test for COVID-19 outside a train station in Bengaluru. AP

Even as COVID restrictions are eased the world over, there is a lurking fear of a new variant going by the name of ‘Deltacron’, which has characteristics of both Delta and Omicron.

While the last variant, Omicron, turned out to be more transmissible but less fatal, the Deltacron might pick the best of the two variants and develop into a supervirus.

Also read: Centre ends COVID-19 containment measures from 31 March; wearing of face mask to continue

According to a report by NPR, in some instances, the virus seems to be optimizing the combinations – picking the best traits from each for infectiousness and immune evasion.

Let’s find out what is the Deltacron variant of the coronavirus and how dangerous can it be:

What is Deltacron

Deltacron was first identified in mid-February, when scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris uploaded a genetic sequence of the coronavirus that looked different from previous sequences.

According to The Print, the virus sample had come from an elderly man in northern France and looked odd. Most of its genetic sequence was the same as Delta’s, which was dominant worldwide up until late last year, but the part of the sequence that encodes the virus’s spike protein came from Omicron.

The Deltacron variant was first detected in samples taken from 25 patients in Cyprus. The hybrid variants that are formed by combining parts of two different variants are called recombinant.

Earlier this month, WHO’s Dr Mike Ryan noted that the possibility of recombinants has always been on the table.

“Recombination occurs when two viruses infect the same person or the same animal and what you then have is … effectively two viruses can exchange large amounts of genetic information and you effectively get a new virus out the other end … that is how we generate pandemics of influenza.”

The Deltacrom has so far been rare with cases detected in only France, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

Also read: India fared better than others in managing Omicron-driven COVID-19 surge, says health ministry

How dangerous can it be

Ryan said that it is very often that due to recombination we get pandemics of influenza.

“So we have to be very cautious … we have to watch these recombinant events very, very closely.”
Deltacron is a combination of Delta variant that wreaked havoc in India and other countries during the second wave and Omicron that spread at an unprecedented rate.

“From the variant’s perspective, it has the best of worlds,” Nguyen says. “It’s surprising that the virus can really do this, and do it very well, as well.

According to an article on The Conversation by Luke O’Neill, professor of Biochemistry at Trinity College in Dublin, It is hard to say in what ways Deltacron will resemble its parents at the moment.

“Delta and omicron are quite different viruses. They differ in how they infect cells and how they evade immunity. We still don’t know enough about deltacron to be able to tell how different it’s going to be either,” he said.

Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist at the World Health Organization, tweeted that we need to wait for experiments to determine the properties of this virus.