India’s COVID-19 genomic surveillance project INSACOG is on alert as Australia, joins the two other countries—UK and the USA—from where a SARS CoV 2 variant with properties of both Delta and Omicron has been detected.
The mutant virus, also being called Deltacron, is thought to have evolved in a patient who may have caught both variants-Delta and Omicron- at the same time but it is not yet established if it was imported or originated in the UK-which was the first to report the recombinant virus.
Officials in the UK Health Security Agency had said late last week that they don't yet know how infectious or severe the newly evolved virus is or whether it will impact the performance of the existing vaccines.
In the UK, the variant has been categorised “currently under monitoring and investigation”, a step lower than the “Variant under Investigation”.
After the UK, at least two seemingly distinct clusters of Deltacron were also reported in genomes from the US, before Australia too reported a similar pattern.
Interestingly, Deltacron was first reported from Cyprus last month, but was later dismissed and put down to sample contamination.
Scientists associated with INSACOG say that recombination in SARS-COV-2 is not very frequent as seen in some viruses, such as influenza, but it is also not entirely novel.
For instance, there have been several recombination events reported in the past from the UK, USA and Japan when various variants such as Alpha, Beta and Delta got together.
“Several recombinant variants have been detected during the course of the pandemic so far but they have not led to any serious outbreaks—lets wait for more evidence before reaching any conclusion in this case too,” said a scientist associated with the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology.
Researchers also insist that there is nothing to panic yet as there is no evidence to suggest that the recombinant variant has any additional advantage compared to Omicron, which is now the most dominant COVID-19 virus variant in India and most other countries.
They add that more epidemiological data on the implication of this recombination is being awaited as more genomes get reported from across the world.
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