Again a new Corona variant is detected: But how dangerous is the mutation?
Nicosia / London – A new variant of the coronavirus has been discovered in Cyprus. A team of scientists reported at the weekend that it was Deltakron, a mixture of the Delta and the Omicron variant * of Sars-CoV-2. This is reported by the Bloomberg news agency.
Virologist Leondios Kostrikis, a researcher at the University of Cyprus, is behind the variant find. According to his own information, his team was able to decode Deltakron using sequencing. At the beginning of January 2021, the data on Deltakron were finally sent to the international science database “Gisaid”.
New Corona variant Deltakron discovered
“In the future we will see whether this strain is pathological or more contagious, or whether it will prevail over Delta and Omikron,” said Kostrikis. So far, only 25 infections with the Deltakron variant have been found. The data situation is extremely thin: Little is known about the infectiousness and the severity of the disease of Covid-19.
How the new Corona variant * could have come about is also unclear. A combination of different strands of variants is considered an option. Virologist Tom Peacock from Imperial College London put forward another theory following the find. He reported on Twitter about a possible contamination in the laboratory.
A new Corona variant was only recently discovered in France. There is hardly any reliable data on this either. According to Peacock, in both cases it is unlikely that “something real or bad” will happen: “There are (yet) no clear signs of this,” said the virologist. (tu) * fr.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
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