To medical professionals, a photo of the Deltacron variant is merely an image of the latest COVID-19 strain. For music lovers, it’s a picture that likens the cover art of a former Billboard 200 chart-topper: Future‘s third studio album, DS2.
On Monday (Jan. 10), after CTV News shared a tweet featuring a graphic of the alleged mutation, fans of Future Hendrix took to share humorous tweets about the striking similarities.
“I’m screaming. I thought this was DS2,” wrote Twitter user @aleelee_.
“Yo they made DS2 into a real thing !!” added @AalokBruhhhh.”
Twitter user @tobeyworld refused to accept that the shared image displayed a pic of Deltacron. “That ain’t Deltacron, that’s DS2.”
“Deltacron want to be DS2 so bad,” @Mic_G693 added, while @TrueTashan questioned whether Future had something in the works. “This looks like DS2 and Future had a whole song about Masks,” he asked. “What is he planning?”
The humorous comparisons come in the wake of reports about the Deltacron variant. According to Bloomberg, the mutation — a combination of the Omicron and Delta variants — was discovered by Leondios Kostrikis, a professor and researcher in Cyprus. He claimed that 25 cases were confirmed and expressed uncertainty about its potential impact and spread. “We will see in the future if this strain is more pathological or more contagious or if it will prevail” against the two dominant strains, Delta and Omicron, he said in an interview with Sigma TV. His findings have since drawn doubts from world health experts, including Dr. Krutika Kuppalli of the World Health Organization.
In response to the reports, the WHO expert said the mutation was “not real” and chalked the data up to a possible “lab contamination of Omicron fragments in a Delta specimen.” The Cyprus researcher, however, defended his previous findings, noting the reported cases “indicate an evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event.”
See more Deltacron and DS2 tweets below.