As the debate rises in India over a new Coronavirus strain being called Delmicron, leading health experts on Saturday advised people not to pay heed to rumours and wait for the global health agencies like the World Health Organisation (WHO) or US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to confirm or deny the presence of such a Covid variant. Several news reports talking about Delmicron surfaced this week in India, quoting Dr Shashank Joshi, a member of Maharashtra’s C-19 task force, who said: “Delmicron, the twin spikes of Delta and Omicron, in Europe and US, has led to a mini-tsunami of cases.”

There is no such Covid variant as of now, and there is no information either on another mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus after Omicron, which is spreading wildly worldwide. Neither the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) nor the Indian National Covid-19 Task Force have spoken about the presence of the so-called Delmicron. Harshal R Salve, Associate Professor at the Centre for Community Medicine, AIIMS, New Delhi, said that no such variant exists. “Omicron is also no new virus as it’s a mutated Coronavirus. As per evidence available so far, its infectivity is on the higher side, but the symptoms are milder in nature. So there is no need to panic about it,” he added.