Deltacron does not meet all requirements to be named a new variant: expert

The scientist then reported it to the international initiative GISAID and named it “Deltacron”. However, neither GSAID nor the World Health Organisation (WHO) have identified Deltacron as a new variant yet.

Dr Chalermchai Boonyaleepun, vice chairman of the Public Health Commission, said on Monday that people should not panic over this new variant because it may not exist.

A virologist in the UK said based on reports, it is possible that the 24 samples were contaminated and urged people to wait for official confirmation.

To help people understand the basic facts of Covid-19 variants, Dr Chalermchai lists four points:

• The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that can mutate easily.
• GSAID is a global science initiative that collects data of all new variants before it verifies and reports them to the public.
• There are more than 1,000 main variants and sub-variants. However, not all have been reported to the public because they do not meet the top three dimensions of public health, mainly ability to spread, ability to develop severe symptoms and ability to resist the vaccine.
• If a new variant is important and will affect humanity, WHO will name it using a Greek alphabet. So far, WHO has used up most of the alphabets before the 15th alphabet, Omicron, and the next variant will be called “Pi”.

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Hence, Chalermchai said, people should not believe everything because the so-called Deltacron variant has not been verified yet. If it is indeed a new variant then it needs to be evaluated based on the three dimensions of public health and should be named “Pi”.