The mixture of delta and omicron, “deltacron,” has caused concern in Sweden recently. Norway’s FHI, on the other hand, is not very worried about the new variant.
On Saturday last week, the newspaper Aftonbladet wrote that vaccine researchers at Karolinska Institutet believe the variant is probably already in Sweden, but they do not know how contagious it is or whether it will push out omicron.
In Norway, the FHI sees no reason to panic.
“We don’t worry very much about this. It is unlikely that such a mixed virus has a greater ability to spread than the omicron BA.2 virus, which is dominant in Norway now. We are still following the developments to see if any of these viruses can affect the disease in any way,” section leader for influenza and other respiratory infections, Karoline Bragstad, wrote in an email to NTB.
No cases detected in Norway
She added that no “deltacron” cases had been discovered in Norway so far.
At the beginning of January, researchers in Cyprus thought they had found a new corona variant that was a mixture of omicron and delta, which was named “deltacron.”
At the time, the FHI believed that the finding could have been a laboratory error, which turned out to be the case.
” Now, however, we have a few but clear examples of viruses that are a mixture of delta and omicron. But it is not the case that the ‘deltacron’ is a specific variant – it is a collective term. It is quite natural and quite common for viruses to recombine when there is a high incidence of two different varieties at the same time. We have also seen recombinants in the past with the delta viruses,” Bragstad emphasized.
Source: © NTB Scanpix / #Norway Today / #NorwayTodayNews
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