A new variant of COVID-19 with dozens of mutations discovered in southern France is not seen as a threat on the level of Omicron - but health officials are still keeping a close eye on it.
IHU, as it's been dubbed, was first found in November 2021.
It has the N501Y mutation also found in the Alpha, Beta, Omicron and Gamma variants, which makes it more infectious, in addition to the E484K mutation found in Gamma and Beta, which helps the virus evade people's immunity, as well as numerous other changes.
PCR tests showed the index case - a man who had recently been to Cameroon, which has very low vaccination coverage - had an "atypical combination" of mutations which looked nothing like the Delta variant, dominant at the time.
But it appears the World Health Organization (WHO) doesn't see IHU as a threat on the scale of Omicron, which was discovered in South Africa at roughly the same time but has since spread and become the dominant COVID-19 strain across much of the world.
WHO incident manager on COVID-19 Abdi Mahamud said at a press briefing in Switzerland this week that while IHU had been "on our radar", it had "had a lot of chances to pick up".
Doubts over IHU's threat level are backed by other COVID-19 experts.
Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who was one of the first to publicly predict SARS-CoV-2 would result in a pandemic, noted ICU admissions in France seemed to be rising fastest in the area where IHU has been found.
"It's a signal we need to watch what is happening there more carefully," he tweeted, adding that it will have a tough time displacing the super-contagious Omicron and deadlier Delta variants.
Imperial College virologist Tom Peacock pointed out the first detection of B.1.640.2 predated the discovery of Omicron by nearly three weeks.
"This virus has had a decent chance to cause trouble but never really materialised (as far as we can tell at least)," he wrote.
"If B.1.640.2 was a genuine threat it's had quite a bit of time to demonstrate that, but never really got out the starting block - it looks a lot like a dud variant... obviously should be continued to be monitored though."
