No, we don't know that the "IHU variant" is more infectious than Omicron.
Plus what is florona? It's probably not what you think it is.
Hello, hello!
How are you in 2022? I wasn’t planning on sending out a newsletter after writing a long one just a few days ago, but I thought it would be good to share my thoughts about the latest misinformation on the internet regarding the “IHU variant” that is making rounds on my news-feeds.
I’m not regular on Twitter anymore, but knowing what I know about that platform, I suspect that it whipped up a bit of frenzy there as well. I know this will have some noted fearmongers going into extra-gear.
Remain vigilant. We have enough to be worried about with Delta and Omicron globally. The United States just hit a million cases in one day. Hospitals are getting overrun with (mostly unvaccinated) patients. It will be a rough couple of months.
In the midst of this, what’s is going on with a new variant dubbed IHU variant?
I’ve noted that some media outlets have declared that it has 46 mutations and that is more infectious than even Omicron. Let’s break down what we know about this variant quickly, not based on any tweet or any WhatsApp forward or even any news-source but from the primary literature.
The primary source of information on the variant here is a preprint posted on the medRxiv server. This preprint has not been peer-reviewed by scientists yet.
The preprint has a few sentences that I would have written differently, and a reviewer might ask to be changed. But skimming through the paper, there’s really nothing to indicate yet that this variant is worse than Delta or Omicron.
I will repeat this for those in the back. There is nothing in the preprint to indicate that there is anything here worse than Delta or Omicron. Some reporters have reported that it has 46 mutations and hence must be more infectious. That’s not how any of this works.
The preprint doesn’t claim either that the variant is more infectious or concerning than any existing variant of concern.
Let me quote it word for word—
It is too early to speculate on virological, epidemiological or clinical features of this IHU variant based on these 12 cases.
WHO has not added it to a variants of concern list and at the time of writing we only know about those 12 cases.
But that did not stop others from speculating wildly and irresponsibly declaring that it was more infectious than Omicron.
Note that the variant was detected from nasopharyngeal samples in November at the time when Omicron was exploding in South Africa, even though the preprint was posted on December 29.
A few other points:
The abstract has the following sentence which has been construed as 46 mutations—
The genomes were obtained by next-generation sequencing with Oxford Nanopore Technologies on GridION instruments within ≈8 h. Their analysis revealed 46 mutations and 37 deletions resulting in 30 amino acid substitutions and 12 deletions.
Deletions are technically mutations too, so what they mean is that the variant has a predicted 46 point mutations or nucleotide substitutions and 37 other mutations.
Again this doesn’t make it worse than it is. In fact we don’t know what it is. But just please don’t OMG SO MANY MUTATIONS.
By the way, one of the authors of the preprint is Dr. Didier Raoult. None other than the same Dr. Raoult who made bogus COVID-19 treatment hydroxychloroquine famous globally.
As you were before, please.
The gentleman of florona
Here’s a question for you. How many people can sit in the back seat of an autorickshaw?
Three.
Now, here’s a question that you can’t answer because no one knows the answer to. How many viruses and bacteria can sit inside a human at the same time?
Many trillion at least, even if all don’t cause disease.
There’s been quite some hullabaloo regarding a patient who was infected with both SARS-CoV-2 and influenza at the same time in Israel.
It has been called florona.
But what exactly is florona? A new virus? Has the coronavirus mutated and merged with the influenza virus. No, these two viruses are incredibly divergent.
No, florona is simply a person with two infections at once.
If you can have a headache and a tummy ache at the same time, there’s nothing preventing you from getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 and influenza at the same time. It’s your bad luck that you were exposed to both viruses around the same time and your immune system had to fight not one but two pathogens.
Some people can and likely do get infected with two or more pathogens at the same time. The reason we don’t know is that no one going around doing diagnostic tests for influenza along with SARS-CoV-2.
Seek and you shall find.
Regular non-COVID programming will resume in the next newsletter.
Thank you for this succinct update. Loved the humour too. Looking forward to the next installment of your newsletter already.
Still thinking how protected people are after natural infection and two dose of India's covisheild