COVID-19’s iota variant, or SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.526, was first identified in New York City in November 2020. Subsequently, the variant was discovered in each of the United States’ 52 states, as well as in 27 other countries.

Not a day goes by without intimidating headlines about the Delta variant, first discovered in India. However, this is far from the only viral lineage of concern to epidemiologists, physicians, and national and international health authorities.

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Today, there are about 20 variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in the world. Some of them are named according to the WHO classification based on the Greek alphabet. These are: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zita, Ita, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda. WHO defines Iota as “variants of interest”.

These variants differ from each other by the genetic changes present in their genetic material. Most often we are talking about mutation (replacement of one nucleotide with another (in other words, replacing one “letter” with another), deletion (loss of one or more nucleotides), less often about insertion (adding one or more nucleotides).

In total, more than six thousand modifications have been registered. They underlie over 45,000 different genetic sequences coding for a single spike protein. However, only a small fraction of these genetic modifications affect the biological properties of the virus.

Strain Iota became the hero of this week when the media circulated the findings of a team of scientists from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, published on medrxiv.org on August 7.

It was reported that mortality from the Iota variant of coronavirus in the 65-74 age group is 82 percent higher than from other strains of coronavirus prevalent in New York before it.

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Iota also increased Covid deaths by 72 percent in people over 75, and 46 percent in the 45-64 age group, compared with previous strains that affected New Yorkers. 

In addition, Iota is transmitted 15-25 percent faster than other known mutations, the researchers concluded. 

But the fact is that during this study there was no active circulation of the Delta strain. The studies were conducted from November 2020 to April 2021. And the Delta variant of the coronavirus appeared just in mid-Feb or April after the completion of this study.

The Delta strain is known to have supplanted others. This means that the very Iota mentioned in the study, at least at the moment, is not the cause of concern. 

From the publication of scientists, it follows that the Iota variant could not spread widely in any country and almost disappeared in the United States and it is not considered a “threatening variant” of the virus: its mortality rate among the elderly is lower than that of the Alpha variant, known as the “British”.

And the study itself raises doubts. The authors were unable to explain why Iota increases mortality only among the elderly, but not among young and middle-aged people.

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Scientists only suggested that the whole thing was in the lack of data on mortality: the deaths among people under 45 years old were too few for the model to show the difference between the strains of the first and second wave.

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