‘What letter is IHU’: Netizens vent frustrations as yet another COVID variant is discovered

As the new IHU variant continues to affect normalcy and the economy in France, netizens have taken to social media to express their frustrations at new variants of the novel coronavirus that seem to be coming up pretty much every other day.   One of the users posted a dialogue from the popular TV serial Taarak Mehta ka Ooltah Chashma. A user named egg but in spanish posted a scene from the American sitcom The Simpsons wherein two characters are shown having a fight with one of the characters labelled as different COVID-19 variants -- Delta, Omicron and IHU. The user tweeted, "I'm just going to retweet this every other week with whatever the latest variant is."

Another user wrote, “IHU variant? Are we using India’s alphabet now? I thought we were using the Greek alphabet. What letter is IHU, and how close is it to Z, ffs?”

Here is how the Internet reacted to an all new COVID-19 variant in France

For the unversed, France has reported an all-new coronavirus variant named IHU, also known as B.1.640.2. The European country has reported 12 cases of the variant so far.   According to researchers, the first positive case of this variant was detected in an adult using an RT-PCR test performed in a laboratory on a nasal sample collected in mid-November last year.   As per the medRxiv paper on the same, this variant has 46 mutations and 37 deletions resulting in 30 amino acid substitutions and 12 deletions. The variant can reportedly be traced back to the Central African country Cameroon.

Also read: Is IHU a new variant? All you need to know about B.1.640.2