PETALING JAYA: A Cypriot scientist has defended his assertion that a new strain of Covid-19 exists that combines characteristics of the Delta and Omicron variants, reports Bloomberg.
It was reported that 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”.
Kostrikis said Deltacron infection is higher among patients hospitalised for Covid-19 than non-hospitalised patients, which rules out the contamination hypothesis.