Brazil has two cases of Covid of the deltacron variant, says Queiroga

Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga said that there are two cases of the deltacron variant in Brazil, one in Amapá and the other in Pará. This variant is a recombination of the delta and omicron variants of Covid.

“Our genomic surveillance service has already identified two cases in Brazil: one in Amapá and the other in Pará. And we monitor all these cases. This is the result of strengthening the capacity for genomic surveillance in Brazil,” he told reporters on Tuesday. (15).

Queiroga said that the measures against this new variant remain the same. “This variant is a variant of importance and requires monitoring […] if I had to indicate a measure, it would be the application of the booster dose”, he pointed out.

The recombinant virus has been circulating since January in several regions of France and there are detections of similar genomes in Denmark and the Netherlands. Such an event is not, at least so far, a cause for concern.

In a Twitter post on March 8, Maria Van Kerkhove, epidemiologist and technical lead at the WHO (World Health Organization) for Covid-19, stated that this type of recombination is expected with the intense circulation of the omicron and delta variants. and that the WHO team is following up and discussing the matter.

At the end of February, the topic had already been discussed by experts in a WHO question and answer session. At the time, Kerkhove reassured people about recombination events and explained that this process is basically a joining of “pieces” of one variant with “pieces” of another.

“I don’t want to scare people with the idea of ​​recombination,” Kerkhove said on Feb. 22. “Maybe we’ll start to see recombinations. That could happen, but it could be a reflection of better surveillance.”