A researcher in Cyprus reportedly identified 'Deltacron,' a coronavirus variant thought to combine Delta and Omicron

• A researcher in Cyprus believes he has identified a new coronavirus variant.
• The professor Leondios Kostrikis says his team has found 25 cases of what he calls "Deltacron."

A researcher in Cyprus says he has identified a new coronavirus variant dubbed "Deltacron," which combined the Delta and Omicron variants, Bloomberg News reported.

Leondios Kostrikis, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cyprus, said in an interview with Sigma TV on Friday that he and a team of researchers had identified 25 cases of Deltacron.

It's too early to tell what kind of impact Deltacron will have, Kostrikis told Sigma TV, according to Bloomberg News.

"We will see in the future if this strain is more pathological or more contagious or if it will prevail," he said. But he expressed doubts it would overtake Omicron, which is highly contagious and spreads quickly.

At least one virologist, however, doubts the 25 cases discovered by Kostrikis and his team are actually caused by a new variant.

Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial Department of Infectious Disease in Britain, said in a tweet on Saturday that it could be a contamination.

"The Cypriot 'deltacron' sequences reported by several large media outlets look to be quite clearly contamination — they do not cluster on a phylogenetic tree and have a whole Artic primer sequencing amplicon of omicron in an otherwise delta backbone," he said.

—Tom Peacock (@PeacockFlu) January 8, 2022

COVID-19 cases are spreading rapidly around the world and particularly in the US.