‘Deltacron’ danger: Name of presumed hybrid fuels panic, experts say

The name of the so-called 'scariant' prompted health officials to speak out about misleading, panic-inducing terminology.

If you thought it was the name of a new Transformers movie, think again.

“Deltacron” started making headlines earlier in January, as an alleged hybrid between two COVID-19 variants.

Announced by a University of Cyprus researcher, the hybrid was a reported cross between Omicron and Delta that had allegedly infected 25 people, putting 11 in hospital.

“It was basically a viral sequence that contained a spike protein that looked a lot like Omicron … but was otherwise a Delta,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist with the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO), told Global News over Zoom.

She says that quickly turned out not to be true, though.

The genome sequence for Deltacron was uploaded to an international database accessible to scientists around the world.

Upon inspection, multiple researchers said the sequence appears to be a “contamination,” “lab error” or “artifact,” where a highly sensitive sequencing machine accidentally picked up traces of another virus in the room and began to sequence that genome instead.

Scientists could tell right away because they’ve seen this error before, according to Sarah Otto.