The covid-19 Pandemic has taught the world that acting early pays off. If you wait a week for better data on which to base a decision, you can find yourself in a bad situation. Many countries in Europe and elsewhere banned travel to southern Africa within a day after the news of the new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus broke in South Africa. The variant Omicron was named by the World Health Organisation on November 26th and is only for "variants of concern".
There are many concerns with Omicron. It may be able to spread more easily than Delta, the variant that dominates cases of covid around the world today. Within months, Omicron could replace Delta. In that case, Omicron would cause bigger outbreaks that are harder to stop. The vaccines and drugs against covid may need to be changed because they may be less potent against Omicron.
The fears are based on early data on Omicron emerging from South Africa. It's not certain whether these fears will come to pass. It will take weeks or even months before there is evidence that Omicron poses a real threat. Many countries are trying to stop the new variant from entering their shores. They are buying time to prepare for the worst.
The first signs of a new variant spreading in South Africa emerged this week, when covid infections increased suddenly and sharply from less than 300 cases on November 16th to more than 1,200 cases on November 25th. The majority of these infections were in one province, which is named after its capital.
The infections were thought to be linked to a student party. A new variant would erupt briefly and then die away. Over time, new cases in the province became more dispersed. South African scientists looked at the genomic sequence of the samples to see the new variant.
Even though the numbers were small, the new variant was spreading quickly in other provinces. The pattern suggests that Omicron may be ahead of Delta. The nature of Omicron's mutations adds to the support for this hypothesis. It has about 50 of them. TheRBD of the virus's spikeProtein is the most worrying. The part of the virus that can attach to human cells is called theRBD. There are only two changes to the Delta andRBD in the Beta variant.
Quality is not necessarily quantity. Several of those in Omicron have been found to make the virus more infectious. Some of them make it easier for the body to evade its innate immune response, others weaken it. There are various combinations of Omicron's genes present in all of the concerns that have arisen so far.
The jabs may have to be adjusted if the Omicron mutations make covid vaccines less potent. The makers of the covid jab, Pfizer and BioNTech, said that they would be able to modify their vaccine within six weeks and send the first batches within 100 days. The Omicron mutations do not appear to be a threat to the efficacy of antiviral medicines for covid, but they could defeat some antibody therapies, which are given to people unable to mount an immune response.
It is not clear if Omicron will replace Delta in other parts of the world. South Africa had a wave of the variant that did not spread. Alpha, which swept across Europe, never made it to South Africa. The patterns may have to do with variations in demography and infections that interact with the disease.
Lots of Omicron remains to be discovered. It is clear that the world is better placed to resist it than it was when Delta arrived in India. Delta had already spread to many parts of the world by the time it was identified as a variant of concern. It's not clear whether Omicron poses a global threat.
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