Coronavirus: 'Deltacron' discovery not a mistake, says scientist who claims he found new variant | South China Morning Post

A Cypriot scientist defended his assertion that a new strain of Covid-19 exists that combines characteristics of the Delta and Omicron variants. Other scientists have speculated that Leonidos Kostrikis's findings are a result of laboratory contamination. But he said in an emailed statement on Sunday that the cases he has identified "indicate an evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event". Deltacron infection is higher among patients hospitalised for Covid-19 than among non-hospitalised patients, so that rules out the contamination hypothesis, said Kostrikis, a professor of biological sciences at…