All medical researchers knew that the SARS-CoV-2 virus would do what pretty much any other virus does: mutate in order to try to survive. If the Delta variant caused a lot of concerns worldwide, the newer Omicron came and was likely a milder form of the coronavirus, as Dr. Scott Gottlieb called it.
As for now, a new variant of COVID called “Deltacron” was discovered by Leondios Kostrikis, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cyprus, according to Bloomberg. The variant combines both Omicron and Delta.
25 cases were found
25 cases of the Deltacron variant were found, and the variant seems to have the potential of leading to illness that requires hospitalization.
Until now, researchers don’t have any idea if the new strain is more infectious, more pathological, or if it is more severe than Delta and Omicron. The good news is that they want to find out, as the sequences of the 25 cases were sent to analysis.
During an interview with Sigma TV on Friday, Kostrikis explained regarding the comparison with Delta and Omicron, as quoted by CNBC.com:
We will see in the future if this strain is more pathological or more contagious or if it will prevail.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA Commissioner, said some interesting things about Omicron, as speaking to “Face the Nation”. He said, as quoted by CBSNews.com:
There’s a very clear, as I said, decoupling between cases and hospitalizations and does appear now based on a lot of experimental evidence that we’ve gotten just in the last two weeks, that this is a milder form of the coronavirus appears to be a more of an upper airway disease and a lower airway disease that’s good for most Americans,
The one group that may be a problem is very young kids, very young children, toddlers who have trouble with upper airway infections, and you’re in fact seeing more croup-like infections and bronchiolitis in New York City among children.