Albania has reported recently a slight increase in new confirmed coronavirus infections this week, reversing a nearly two-month trend. The Public Health Institution (PHI) had not confirmed yet that the Delta variant arrived in Albania, but local media reported on Monday that a person arrived to Albania from Great Britain have tested positive of the new dangerous mutation of Covid-19.

This person has arrived to Tirana from Britain had a test before arriving to Albania and got the result a day after he arrived and tested positive of Covid-19 with the Delta variant. 

This maybe is not the only case.

The Delta variant “is faster, it is fitter, [and] it will pick off the more vulnerable more efficiently than previous variants,” warned Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, on June 21.

Delta has multiple mutation that appear to give it an advantage over other strains. The most important apparent advantage is that the mutations may make the strain more transmissible than any other variant, which would also make it the most dangerous variant yet. Professor Neil Ferguson, a leading epidemiologist at Imperial College London and one of the chief pandemic advisers to the U.K. government, said on June 4 that Delta is estimated to be 60 percent more transmissible than Alpha, which is itself more transmissible than the original strain of the coronavirus that emerged in China in late 2019 — and that is why scientists believe it became a dominant variant globally. Other estimates from the U.K. have said that Delta may be 40 or 50 percent more transmissible than Alpha.

Numerous COVID experts and the WHO warn that Delta variant will soon become the most dominant COVID strain in the world and drive rapid outbreaks among unvaccinated populations.

There is limited research regarding whether or not the Delta variant causes more severe illness than other variants. According to Public Health England, early data suggests that Delta is more likely to lead to hospitalization than Alpha, but that could be due to increased transmissibility rather than it being more pathogenic.