‘Delta plus’: what we know so far about India’s new Covid ‘variant of concern’

A new Covid-19 mutation of the highly contagious Delta variant has been circulating in the UK for weeks, newly published official data shows.

Public Health England (PHE) says that at least 41 cases of the “Delta plus” variant have been detected in the UK since 26 April and that experts are “continuing to investigate its significance”.

The new strain has been identified as a “variant of concern” in India, where experts are warning that Delta Plus “has three worrying characteristics”, Sky News reports - “increased transmissibility, stronger binding in receptors of lung cells and potential reduction in monoclonal antibody response”.

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Variant of concern?

Also known as AY.1, the Delta Plus variant was first identified in Europe but is related to the original Delta variant that originated in India.

The new variant “contains an additional mutation called K417N on the coronavirus spike, which has been found in the Beta and Gamma variants, first found in South Africa and Brazil respectively”, explains the BBC’s India correspondent Soutik Biswas.

The Beta strain “was linked to increased hospitalisation and deaths during South Africa's first wave of infections, while Gamma was estimated to be highly transmissible”, Biswas notes.

Dr Lance Pinto, a consultant respirologist at Mumbai’s Hinduja National Hospital, told Sky News that experts in India are “quite concerned about the Delta plus variant, given that it has a mutation that was attributed to the Beta variant escaping the immunity offered” by Covid vaccines.

“The concerns also revolve around the possibility of reinfections as there are reports that the variant escapes neutralisation with the antibody cocktail,” Pinto added.

Other top scientists have joined Pinto in voicing fears about the “extremely transmissible” strain. Some say that “even walking next to a Covid-19 patient who is a carrier of this variant without a mask may lead to the spread of infection”, India Today reports.

Randeep Guleria, director of the All India Institute Of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, told the broadcaster that while standard coronavirus restrictions should help suppress the variant, researchers at “a network of labs” were “undertaking genomic sequencing” to find out “if vaccines are effective against this variant or not”.

Delta Plus was first detected in India in April and around 40 cases have since been reported across six districts in three states: Maharashtra, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh.

As the new strain continues to spread, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his government and the scientific community “have warned of a third wave which could be upon the country in a few weeks”, says Sky News. India was hammered by a second wave of coronavirus just months ago and has reported a total of more than 30 million cases and almost 391,000 deaths, according to latest data from Johns Hopkins University.

As well as India and the UK, cases of the Delta plus strain have also been reported in Canada, China, Japan, Nepal, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Turkey, Switzerland and the US.

But while many experts are worried, some leading virologists are calling for calm.

“There is no data yet to support the variant of concern claim,” said Dr Gagandeep Kang, the first Indian woman to be elected fellow of the Royal Society of London. “You need biological and clinical information in order to consider whether it is truly a variant of concern.”

To put that another way, says the BBC, the experts need “more data to determine whether the variant is neutralised by antibodies generated by available vaccines”, and more information about “the increase in transmissibility, diagnostic failures - routine tests not picking up the variant - and whether the variant is causing more severe disease”.

“Delta plus might have a slight advantage at infecting and spreading between people who were previously infected earlier during the pandemic or who have weak or incomplete vaccine immunity,” Dr Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University, told India correspondent Biswas.

“I would keep calm. I don’t think India or anyone else in the world has released or accumulated enough data to distinguish the risk from the so-called Delta plus as being more dangerous or concerning than the original Delta variant.”