The world struggles to exit the Covid-19 pandemic and new variants keep on breaking out. Although so far, variants were more contagious but less dangerous than Delta, the latest newcomer has the authorities worried, for it could be as contagious as Omicron and as virulent as Delta. Here is more about the XD variant already spreading in France.
In early February, the UK warned against the Deltacron variant, a recombination of two major variants. The authorities considered that one infected by this mutation was contaminated both by Delta and by Omicron.
Since then, the UK’s health authorities have listed Deltacron as mutation “under surveillance” and “inquired”. Now, this recombinant is called XD, and according to a study by the Institut Pasteur, it has Omicron’s immune escape capacity and Delta’s acute virulence.
Detected for the first time in north of France in early January, XD slowly spreads over the country and Europe. To date, 84 contaminations with the variant have been reported in five countries, France included. This is a hybridization, a chimera, that took the features of the two parent variants.
A scientific experiment carried out on mice, with XD-related infection, leads to very worrying results, as they all died within 9 days. Yet, unlike Omicron – that quickly developed – XD has been spreading for three months without infecting a lot of people.
