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Meanwhile, the name delta comes from the WHO system, which aims to simplify genomics for the general public. Names relevant cases of covid if he believes they may be of particular interest. There are currently eight families with Greek letters, but WHO considers them all deltas until there is evidence that a new subclade of the first delta species behaves differently from its parents.
“Delta plus” takes the WHO definition and mixes it with Pango’s genealogy. This does not mean that the virus is more dangerous or more relevant.
“People get pretty worried when they see a new Pango name. But the discovery of new variants should not upset us. All the time we see new variants emerging with no distinct behavior at all,” says Brito. “If we have evidence that a new generation is more threatening, WHO will give it a new name.”
monitoring evolution
“For a genomic scientist like me, I want to know what variations we’re seeing,” says Kelsey Florek, senior genomics and data scientist at the Wisconsin state public health laboratory. “For the wider public, it doesn’t really make a difference. Classifying them all as deltas is sufficient for policy makers, public health and communication with the public.”
Basically, viral evolution works like any other species. As the virus spreads throughout the body, it creates copies of itself, often with minor bugs and changes. Most of these are dead ends, but sometimes an erroneous copy builds up in one person enough to spread it to another.
This week, scientists divided the delta’s ‘children’ into 12 families to better track small-scale local changes. None of this means that the virus itself changed suddenly.
As the virus spreads from person to person, it accumulates these tiny changes, allowing scientists to track transmission patterns – the same way we can look at human genomes and determine which people are related. But in viruses, most of these genetic changes have no effect on the way they actually affect individuals and communities.
But genomics scientists need a way to trace this viral evolution, both for basic science and to detect any changes in behavior as early as possible. This is the reason why they closely follow the patterns in the delta, because it spreads so fast. The Pango team continues to subcategorize the descendants of the first delta lineage, B.1.617.2.
Until recently, he had registered three “children” named AY.1, AY.2 and AY.3 as well as 617.2. This week the team decided to split these children into 12 families to better track small-scale local changes – hence a total of 13 delta variants. None of this means that the virus itself changed suddenly.
“You’re parting your hair with these emerging variants, especially at the edges,” says Duncan MacCannell, chief scientific officer of the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection. “Depending on how these definitions are created and refined, hairs can be split in different ways.”
What is important to the public?
It is worth noting that not all variants with WHO nicknames are equally bad. When the organization names a new family, it also adds a label that tells us how worried we should be.
The lowest level one variant of interest, so it’s worth keeping an eye on; one in the middle anxiety variant, like the delta, which has obviously evolved to be more dangerous. Often the variants involved are given this label because they share a mutation with the variants of concern – they are under surveillance.
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