A faster spreading new sub-variant of Delta variant AY.4.2 commonly known as “Delta Plus” or a “lineage” of AY.4.2 is reportedly detected in 8 states in US. CBS News writes: “Labs in California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Washington state, plus the District of Columbia, have so far spotted at least one case of AY.4.2.”.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) AY.4.2 has made up less than 0.05% of circulating cases in the U.S. for several weeks and has not classified this sub-lineage separately yet.

We have teams that are constantly reviewing the genetic sequence data and looking for blips, an increase in a certain proportion or just something that’s completely new.

– Dr. Summer Galloway, executive secretary of the U.S. government’s SARS-CoV-2 Interagency Group (source: CBS News)

In the Forbes, Bruce Y. Lee writes that the AY.4.2 subvariant has now spread to at least 42 different countries, including the U.S., according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) Weekly epidemiological update on Covid-19.

Nevan Krogan, a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Business Insider that it’s likely that AY.4.2 is present in multiple other states and cases just haven’t been spotted yet.

• A potentially faster-spreading Delta variant, AY.4.2, has been spotted in 8 states
• The ‘Delta Plus’ variant —AY.4.2— has been detected in New York and California, but experts say not to panic
• AY.4.2, A Delta Covid-19 Coronavirus Subvariant, Has Spread To 42 Countries
• COVID: how worried should we be about the new AY.4.2 lineage of the coronavirus?

“While reports of AY.4.2 have been going up since July of this year, the subvariant still only accounted for about 5.9% of all reported Delta cases reported in the week of October 3. So, it’s not as if AY.4.2 has been sweeping the world just yet. Nevertheless, the AY.4.2 subvariant has been increasing at a modest rate in the United Kingdom (U.K.), which has provided 93% of the AY.4.2 reports to date,” writes Lee in Forbes.

If you look at where this virus is being reported as most prevalent, it’s in England. Why? It’s because they do better sequencing than anyone else in the world.

– Nevan Krogan (source: Business Insider)

According to Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, mutation rate of Delta variant could be slowed by different ways. “The solution to the variants is the vaccine.If people want to be less scared of the variants, the solution is to have people vaccinated so there are less variants generally,” reportedly said Adalja.