By Julia Marnin

Did coronavirus variants delta and omicron form a “super variant” called “deltacron”? It’s likely you’ve heard the name by now, but experts are saying the reported COVID-19 variant combination is likely a “scariant.” “#Omicron and #Delta did NOT form a super variant,” wrote Krutika Kuppali, who’s a part of the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 technical team, on Twitter on Jan. 9.

Concerns about a potential new variant came after a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cyprus, Leondios Kostrikis, said his team found 25 cases of a combination of “omicron and delta co-infections” overseas, reported on Jan. 8. They named what they found “deltacron.” The lab sequences of the cases were provided to the international GISAID database on Jan. 7.

Since then, many experts have raised doubts about the findings. Kuppali said it’s “likely sequencing artifact (lab contamination of Omicron fragments in a Delta specimen),” meaning traces of the delta variant somehow mixed with omicron in the lab, not through natural means. Similarly to Kuppali, a virologist from the Imperial Department of Infectious Disease in the U.K. suspects deltacron is likely a lab “contamination” rather than a combination of delta and omicron, Tom Peacock wrote on Twitter on Jan. 8. “The Cypriot ‘Deltacron’ sequences reported by several large media outlets look to be quite clearly contamination,” Peacock said. In a separate tweet addressing the matter, Peacock wrote “this is not really related to ‘quality of the lab’ or anything similar - this literally happens to every sequencing lab occasionally!,” on Jan. 9.