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At the beginning of 2022, the More Powerful and More Secretive New Coronavirus Omicron variant continues to spread around the world, bringing more uncertainty to the epidemic prevention work of various countries in the new year. According to a weekly epidemiological report published by WHO on 11 January, Omicron is rapidly replacing other virus variants as the main circulating strain. European and American countries have almost completely fallen, with the United States setting a record for 1.4 million new infections in a single day; in the mainland, as of January 15, 14 provinces have reported imported cases of Omicron, and 6 provinces and cities, including Zhuhai, Zhongshan, Tianjin, Liaoning, Dalian, Liaoning, Anyang, and Shanghai, have reported local Omicron outbreaks. The mainland faces the dual challenge of importing Delta and Omicron strains into the outbreak [1].
However, while the Omicron variant is worrying, there are two "new variants of the new coronavirus" named very close to Delta and Omicron on the Internet. Are they new variants of the more frightening virus, or are they "cyber virus variants that exist for the sake of eyeballs"?
Delmicron in India and Deltacron in Cyprus
On Christmas Eve last year, Dr Shashank Joshi, a member of India's COVID-19 Working Group, said at a local press briefing: "The Delta and Omicron variants, Delmicron, have set off a mini-tsunami of infected cases in Europe and the United States. The media, which was good at grasping key words, immediately found the focus of this sentence "Delmicron"[2], and within a few days, this new word appeared in the headlines of various Indian media reports, and was paired with words such as "super strain" and "new variant", implying that these two highly communicative strains were combined into one, and throughout the article, there was neither substantial scientific evidence nor authoritative proof from the World Health Organization. However, for the average reader who doesn't have the expertise and is plagued by the pandemic, just looking at the headline can trigger a stronger sense of panic.
Title of an online media report about delmicron on December 28[3]
Not long after, the media began to debunk the rumors, pointing out that Dr. Joshi's original words were misread, and he himself originally wanted to use the word "Delmicron" to express the situation that the Delta mutation and the Omicron mutation were popular at the same time, resulting in a sharp increase in the number of patients infected with the new crown virus[4], but he did not expect that through the hands of the media, the non-existent "Delmicron new variant" was created out of thin air, causing panic for no reason and making epidemic prevention more difficult. After all, india's new crown epidemic has never been optimistic, according to the Indian government report statistics, by the end of 2021, India's new crown death cases are about 480,000, that is, 340 people in every million people died of the new crown virus infection. A recent study published in the journal Science[5] suggests that the actual number of COVID-19 deaths could reach 3 million, six to seven times more than officially reported.
The storm over "Delmicron" has not completely subsided, and "Deltacron" is here again. On 8 January 2022, the Cyprus Mail was the first to publish a report titled "Coronavirus: New variant discovered in Cyprus"[6], and the country's Health Minister, Michaelis Hadjipantelas, announced the biotechnology and molecular virology laboratory of the University of Cyprus The scientific team at the molecular virology lab, University of Cyprus, identified a variant of the novel coronavirus in a sample of 25 people from the community where the virus spreads, and Dr. Leontios Kostrikis, who led the team, named it "Deltacron" because it had the same genetic background as the Delta strain, while also having the same number of mutations as the Omicron strain (below). ;D eltacron has not yet been reported in other parts of the world, and the team has uploaded its genome sequencing information to GISAID (but specific sequencing data cannot be found on GISAID).
Mutation comparison of five COVID-19 variants in the spike protein region (S1 and S2). The Cyprus strain contains multiple pathogenic mutations common to delta and Omicron strains. [7]
On the same day, the report and the new variant name were quickly adopted by Bloomberg, followed by a rapid focus on "Deltacron" in the multinational media, which at first glance seemed to have recombined the two pandemic strains into one. Dr. Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, was concerned about the incident and immediately tweeted about Deltacron. From a professional point of view, first of all, "true viral recombinants are unlikely to appear within just a few weeks or even months of the co-transmission of the two strains, after all, the global epidemic of the Omicron variant is only a matter of the last month, so I very much suspect that any so-called recombinants already exist...", and secondly, "Many Omicron sequence reports carry Delta-like mutations, such as P681R or L452R, although the recombination may be real, But in fact, most of them are often contaminated with laboratory samples or co-infected. "To identify deltacron strains, you need to independently detect identical recombinants in multiple sequencing laboratories." [8]
Dr. Tom Peacock speculates that the so-called Deltacron is most likely the result of contamination of laboratory samples. [9]
In response, Dr. Leontios Kostrikis adamantly defended his findings, saying that the Infection Rate of Deltacron strains in hospitalized patients was higher than in non-hospitalized individuals, so the contamination hypothesis was unlikely to be established, and multiple sequencing processes in multiple countries had identified the strain in the sample as Deltacron variants, so it was unlikely that it was their lab error. [10]
While the media focused on "Deltacron", the scientific community seemed quite calm. Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the United States believes that further regional epidemiological investigations in Cyprus are needed to verify with more data whether "Deltacron" is a recombinant strain of delta and omicron, or a product of a laboratory accident. [10]
Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease specialist at the World Health Organization, called on Twitter not to use words like "deltacron" (below), which suggest viral/variant fusion and recombination, but are not the case. It is also speculated that the so-called "Deltacron" may be a variant of the sample contamination during the sequencing process. [11]
How are the coronavirus variants named?
Both "delmicron" and "deltacron" are from individual mouths and have been hyped up by the media, but in the field of public health, the World Health Organization has a set of neutral criteria to name the new coronavirus variant.
Since the emergence of various new variants of the new coronavirus, the academic community has been using a system established by GISAID (Global Influenza Data Sharing Initiative), Nextstrain and Pango to name and track the genetic lineage of the new coronavirus. This system is extremely advantageous for professionals, making it easy to trace the genetics to the various characteristics of viruses, such as Omicron's Pango lineage name B.1.1.529. But for the media and the general public, a string of numbers is both inconvenient to remember and error-prone. Out of habit, people like to use the place name or country name first discovered by the mutant strain to call the virus, or merge the existing virus name, but in this way, it is very easy to lead to stigmatization, causing unnecessary controversy and discrimination. As a result, on 31 May 2021, WHO announced the use of Greek letters to name the variant of the new coronavirus, publishing the final name on its website, encouraging governments, media outlets and other organizations to adopt it. Next, there is the alpha, Beta, Delta, and the latest Omicron that we are all familiar with.
In addition, WHO has characterized specific variants that pose greater risk to global public health into "variants of Concern" (VOIs) and "Variant of Interest" to prioritize virus surveillance and research. Among them, "variant strains requiring attention" refers to strains that have been shown at the global public health level to exhibit one or more of the following changes: increased transmissibility, or epidemiologically harmful changes; increased toxicity, or changes in the clinical manifestations of the disease; and reduced effectiveness of public health and social measures or existing diagnostic methods, vaccines, and treatments. [12]
List of VOCs and VOI on the WHO website[12]
Once national surveillance agencies and scientists have detected new variants of the virus that have not yet been reported, they should upload the virus genome sequencing information to the public database, report to WHO, and after evaluation and review by the WHO expert team, determine the degree of risk to public health hazards, and then officially publish specific information, including names, to cause countries to be vigilant and take corresponding epidemiological interventions, as detailed in omicron's complete process from discovery to confirmation. For the general public, seeing the so-called "new variant" names and information given by the media headlines, WHO has also given a set of simple procedures to distinguish the authenticity of the epidemic information on its official website [13] to help everyone not be misled by false reports:
In summary, according to the available information, "Delmicron" is pure media misuse, and "Deltacron" does not meet the WHO naming standards, and is not currently included in the list of high-risk VOC variants, and its biological properties, transmission capacity, toxicity and other aspects still need more detailed data to verify.
How to deal with Omicron?
"Deltacron" is spreading wildly in the online world, while the Omicron mutant strain is sweeping away the real world. After New Year's Day, Europe, which faced Omicron as a great enemy years ago, was the first to change its attitude. Especially in the United Kingdom, France, Spain and other countries, the symptoms of most Omicron infected people are not particularly serious, and people believe that the epidemic is either moving towards an inflection point or has passed the inflection point. As a result, the government and some public health experts are pushing ahead with bold new ways to combat COVID-19 (dubbed "lying flat") in an attempt to make the epidemic gradually part of everyday life.
The UK experienced an inflection point after the major outbreak in December last year, and while hospitalization rates remain high in some areas, the number of new cases reported nationwide on 14 January was more than 80,000 fewer than the new cases on the same day a week earlier. As a result, some politicians have declared that the latest wave of the epidemic is over, while others have advocated a gradual return to normal life. At the same time, many public health experts and scientists are debating whether to end the lockdown and switch to ordinary interventions, although most still encourage the public to wear masks and set ventilation standards in public places.
As for whether the epidemic can be cleared, Graham Medley, a professor of infectious disease model at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, believes that since the virus has spread to the extent it is today, it is difficult to completely eliminate it again. Based on this view, "THE NEW CROWN OUTBREAK MAY BECOME AN ENDEMIC, BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN IT WILL GET BETTER." ”[14]
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez recently declared that people "must learn to live with viruses, just like many other viruses." "Spain will also adjust its national epidemic prevention strategy, which may be more similar to the response to the flu outbreak." French Health Minister Olivier Véran said that although France's current infection rate is high, it is also approaching the peak and is about to usher in an inflection point, and the high vaccination rate of the whole population "may" mean that this will be the last wave of the epidemic.
In the face of an optimistic Europe, WHO has always been cautious, warning against treating the coronavirus as a seasonal influenza virus, and that the COVID-19 pandemic is not currently endemic, and it is too early to draw these conclusions. There's so much more to be done about Covid-19 and COVID-19. And in Africa, Omicron is still on the offensive, and the number of confirmed cases is still soaring. In addition, from a global perspective, vaccination is not widely available, and most of the world's population remains quite vulnerable to the virus. Finally, we also need to remember not to underestimate the mutational ability of the new crown virus.
Zhang Wenhong, director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Huashan Hospital affiliated to Fudan University, also said in a scientific forum a few days ago that the Omicron variant currently shows different characteristics in different countries, and there is no scientific basis for the view that Omilon is a "big flu". He has studied medical images of People infected with Omicron and said that the variant still "bites." A country or region needs a strong immune barrier and medical resources to defend itself against its threat. [15]
However, Dr. Zhang also said: "I still have great confidence in ending the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of this year. "This is (probably) the last winter of COVID-19."
bibliography
[1]https://china.huanqiu.com/article/46PeXiqyG1S
[2]https://www.firstpost.com/health/what-is-delmicron-how-is-it-different-from-omicron-all-your-questions-answered-10230481.html
[3]https://www.financialexpress.com/lifestyle/health/what-exactly-is-delmicron-scientists-warn-of-super-strain-heres-all-about-its-origin-mutation-etc/2389547/
[4]https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/the-delmicron-outbreak-why-we-should-worry-1892877-2021-12-27
[5]https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm5154
[6]https://cyprus-mail.com/2022/01/08/coronavirus-new-variant-discovered-in-cyprus/
[7]https://doi.org/10.1002/mco2.110
[8]https://cyprus-mail.com/2022/01/09/coronavirus-cyprus-deltacron-could-just-be-contamination-imperial-college-virologist-says/
[9]https://twitter.com/PeacockFlu?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
[10]https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/deltacron-new-variant-or-laboratory-error#Findings-defended
[11]https://twitter.com/mvankerkhove?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
[12]https://www.who.int/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants
[13] https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/spotlight/let-s-flatten-the-infodemic-curve
[14]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/world/europe/uk-omicron-coronavirus-pandemic.html
[15]https://news.sina.com.cn/c/2022-01-08/docikyamrmz3928398.shtml