There’s 1 Imported Case of AY.4.2 Delta Subvariant in S’pore, a Mutation of the Delta Strain

The Ministry of Health (MOH) confirmed on Thursday night that Singapore has detected its first case of the AY.4.2 Delta subvariant on Tuesday, 26 October. This is an imported case.

The subvariant is known as the Delta Plus variant, and as the name suggests, it is a mutation of the highly infectious COVID-19 Delta variant. According to studies, it is a combination of the AY.4 Delta variant and the S:Y145H spike mutation.

Now, I know what your first question is.

Is there any other case linked to this imported case? More specifically, has there been any community spread of the variant?

According to MOH, there has not been any community spread from this case.

Should We Be Concerned?

As of now, the World Health Organisation (WHO) classifies the subvariant as a variant of interest, not a variant of concern, so at least that’s slightly less worrying.

MOH said, “While its effects are still being studied, AY.4.2 is currently expected to be similar to other Delta subvariants in terms of transmissibility and severity of illness.”

According to experts, there is no evidence that the AY.4.2 subvariant is more infectious than the Delta variant, but of course, tests are still ongoing to ensure that this is true.

The subvariant has been detected in various countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and parts of Western Europe. Similar to Singapore, Australia and Japan have only detected one case each as at 19 October.

It should be noted that more than 6% of all the cases of the AY.4.2 subvariant have been detected in Britain. However, University College London professor of computational systems biology Francois Balloux said that there hasn’t been a sharp increase in the number of COVID-19 cases in Britain as a result of the subvariant.

He said, “As AY.4.2 is still at fairly low frequency, a 10% increase in its transmissibility could have caused only a small number of additional cases. This is not a situation comparable with the emergence of Alpha and Delta that were far more transmissible (50% or more) than any strain in circulation at the time.”

While Singapore did observe a spike in the number of COVID-19 cases in a day where we hit more than 5,000 cases on Wednesday, the rise is not attributed to the subvariant.

Watch this video to the end to know why a virus would mutate:

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